a Jewish journalist deludes himself about the parochialism of the neoconservatives

by on April 4, 2009 16

Truly a shocking and ultimately disgraceful piece by Ron Kampeas at JTA, saying there's no Jewish Maureen Dowd–which is to say, a columnist who celebrates his/her ethnic roots. In the end disgraceful because it is emblematic of the general lack of reflection in the Jewish/mainstream press of the degree to which Jewish identification, much of it bald (Jeffrey Goldberg had the love of Israel injected into his wedding vows,  he proclaims in his book Prisoners; Eric Alterman recently spoke at the 92d Street Y of his "dual loyalty" to Israel; Elliott Abrams said that Jews have to stand apart from the societies in which they live, when they are not in Israel), has nullified foreign policymaking in the Middle East.

About Philip Weiss

Philip Weiss is Founder and Co-Editor of Mondoweiss.net.
Posted in Beyondoweiss, Iraq, US Policy in the Middle East, US Politics

{ 16 comments... read them below or add one }

  1. Ed says:
    April 4, 2009 at 1:06 pm

    This claim is in the line of: Oh, Jewish Zionists are just a part of another ethnic immigrant group. Yet it goes even further and infers they have even less ethnic consciousness and cohesiveness, and even more humility than others.

    Sorry, other ethnic immigrant groups don't demand the US taxpayer finance their area of origin's ethnic cleansing campaigns…America wasn't attacked on 9/11 due to other ethnic groups' activism on behalof of positioning the US government towards blind allegiance to their area of origin…Other ethnic immigrant groups haven't formed a fifth column utilized to lie Americans into war on behalf of their area origin…

    I could go on and on. But I'll just close by saying that Jewish Zionists give other immigrants a bad name. And they should no longer be able to get away with hiding behind other minorities by claiming criticism of their ethnic-based political ideology is tantamount to bigotry or xenophobia.

  2. Shyl0ck says:
    April 4, 2009 at 2:07 pm

    I am shocked – shocked I tell you – to hear of parochialism and ethnocentrism among Jews.

    Whodathunkit!

  3. Tuyzentfloot says:
    April 4, 2009 at 3:20 pm

    I don't like Maureen Dowd.

  4. Scott says:
    April 4, 2009 at 3:25 pm

    Among the many points that can be made, there are many parallels between the situation of the Irish Catholics and the Palestinians, something noticed by Patrick Leahy recently, and by Ali Abunimah in his talk at a Georgetown Univ. sponsored conference on Palestine yesterday.
    Also Dowd would have seemed absurd, rather than campy, if the Irish weren't a pretty marginal group among the American media elite.

  5. Craig says:
    April 4, 2009 at 3:53 pm

    If there truly were no Maureen Dowd among Jewish journalists — that is, no columnist who can be relied on to always go for the cheap and dishonest but "witty" shot in preference to an honest examination of anything — it would be to the Jews' great credit.

  6. delia says:
    April 4, 2009 at 4:11 pm

    I would be willing to bet money that this whole post-Gaza dust-up is gonna drive alotta Jews away from their Jewishness. You're gonna see a lot more Jews declaring that they're "rootless cosmopolitans."

  7. Gene says:
    April 4, 2009 at 6:09 pm

    We're all doomed, aren't we? ;-)

    I have to go gather some strength. I'm reading Israel Shahak. Good stuff!

  8. MRW. says:
    April 4, 2009 at 6:25 pm

    Elliott Abrams said that Jews have to stand apart from the societies in which they live, when they are not in Israel

    Then they must be acknowledged and judged as "Jews" and they must be acknowledged and judged as non-participants in a society with their own agenda that may or may not run counter to the desires, needs, and national interests of the citizens of any society they live in.

    Therefore, these "Jews" that Abrams isolates cannot complain when they are judged as "Jews." They cannot complain when the populace acknowledges or identifies their outside status, as Elliott Abrams insists, and marks their approval or disapproval.

    Elliott Abrams is saying essentially that Jews are 'out laws'. From a societal point-of-view, he is a true anti-semitic, placing "Jews" outside society as was done to them in the 1930s. He embraces the worst of the xenophobic parts of the agrarian Talmudic writings proper to an ancient era, and which have no place in the universe of 2009. He's a disgrace. And what's even worse is that he belongs nowhere within 10 miles of DC setting US policy.

  9. Gene says:
    April 4, 2009 at 8:23 pm

    I'm currently reading Israel Shahak's Jewish History, Jewish Religion – The Weight of Three Thousand Years. This passage is quite rekevant, I think, to this thread:

    [L]et us imagine ourselves in the year 1780. Then the universally accepted meaning of the term 'Jew' basically coincided with what the Jews themselves understood as constituting their own identity. This identity was primarily religious, but the precepts of religion governed the details of daily behavior in all aspects of life, both social and private, among the Jews themselves as well as in their relation to non-Jews. It was then literally true that a Jew could not even drink a glass of water in the home of a non-Jew. And the same basic laws of behavior towards non-Jews were equally valid from Yemen to New York. Whatever the term by which the Jews of 1780 may be described – and I do not wish to enter into a metaphysical dispute about terms like, 'nation' and 'people' – it is clear that all Jewish communities at that time were separate from the non-Jewish societies in the midst of which they were living.

    However, all this was changed by two parallel processes – beginning in Holland and England, continuing in revolutionary France and in countries which followed the example of the French Revolution, and then in the modern monarchies of the 19th century: the Jews gained a significant level of individual rights (in some cases full legal equality), and the legal power of the Jewish community over its members was destroyed. It should be noted that both developments were simultaneous, and that the latter is even more important, albeit less widely known, than the former. [...]

    [A] great many present-day Jews are nostalgic for that [former] world, their lost paradise, the comfortable closed society from which they were not so much liberated as expelled. A large part of the Zionist movement always wanted to restore it – and this part has gained the upper hand. Many of the motives behind Israeli politics, which so bewilder the poor confused western 'friends of Israel', are perfectly explicable once they are seen simply as reaction, reaction in the political sense which this word has had for the last two hundred years: a forced and in many respects innovative, and therefore illusory, return to the closed society of the Jewish past. [my emphasis]

  10. Gene says:
    April 4, 2009 at 8:25 pm

    Typo: "Relevant" of course, not that weird word I just coined!

  11. Ed says:
    April 4, 2009 at 10:39 pm

    Shahak: "[A] great many present-day Jews are nostalgic for that [former] world, their lost paradise, the comfortable closed society from which they were not so much liberated as expelled. A large part of the Zionist movement always wanted to restore it – and this part has gained the upper hand."
    –
    This reminds of how certain prisoners who have spent the better part of their lives behind bars can't adjust to the outside world and end up committing reckless crimes in order to get thrown back inside. I wonder if certain Jews just can't adjust to life outside the ghetto.

    Also a "closed society" aspect to Judaism that simply doesn't want anything whatsoever to do with the gentile world and its modernism seems to be carried forth internally in certain Jews to an extreme. This is why I support the existence of Israel, but only in defanged form and without a Zionist fifth column allowed to operate in the US, encourage Israel's belligerence, and bait it ever forward. Tenacious armchair diaspora Jewish Zionists with tons of money and influence spurring Israel ever forward may be worse than Israeli ones.

  12. Paul Malfara says:
    April 4, 2009 at 10:41 pm

    Gene,

    I feel that there was some subconscious element of your psyche responsible for the coinage of the new term "rekevant". I view it as a combination of the words "wreck" and "relevant". So the "relevant" component shows how the passage you quoted is related to the thread, and the "wreck" denotes how neo-cons, Goldberg, Elliot Abrams, etc. are destroying America, the host.
    Unfortunately for them, they don't seem to realize that by destroying the host, they pen the ultimate destruction of the parasite, Israel, upon the great wall of history.

    PM

  13. Rowan says:
    April 5, 2009 at 3:21 am

    Kampeas is not a 'journalist', he is a propagandist, and quite a professional one. As far as I can recall, he always has been.

  14. Citizen says:
    April 5, 2009 at 10:43 am

    The insular spirit of the ghetto jew was demonstrated by spitting on the ground every time one
    passed a church. This was a good thing, a duty even. If too many goyim were around, the ghetto jew spit on his own chest.

  16. Citizen says:
    April 5, 2009 at 5:42 pm

    really:

    Lots of info on this ancient practice; here's a couple if you're interested:

    http://www.solargeneral.com/mirrors/Flawless%20Logic%20Library/library.flawlesslogic.com/poles.htm

    http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-invisible-wall-by-harry-bernstein-439390.html

    http://www.scribd.com/doc/11710200/Zionism-Judaism-Israel-Shahak-Israel-Jewish-History-Jewish-Religion

    http://www.scribd.com/doc/8321625/Jewish-History-Jewish-Religion-The-Weight-of-Three-Thousand-Years-by-Israel-Shahak

Leave a Reply