What can you expect of an article in the Jewish Week titled, "Times’ Cohen Getting Under Our Skin." The enlightened Times columnist gave editor and publisher Gary Rosenblatt an interview at his office at the New York Times, and said that Gaza had transformed his view of the Middle East (Iraq did it for us here).
Irritated, Rosenblatt wanted to make sure Cohen is Jewish. So before the drubbing at the end of the article (too late!), there is a lot of Jewish identity stuff. Who is getting bar mitzvah'd in Cohen's family, etc.
The best part is Cohen on Israel–"what he describes as a willful ignorance among Israelis of their reality and responsibility." The new mantra is dignity and "humiliation" (Obama used that word in Cairo). Jewish Week:
"The
great operative word" among Palestinians now is "humiliation," Cohen
said. "Whether or not it’s desired, that’s the effect. And it’s not
good for the Palestinians, the Israelis or the Jewish soul."…
"Israel is a strange place," he said, "a miracle" in creating a successful, wealthy society in six decades, but also "a paradox" because "the unhappy fact about Israel is you can be lulled by it, you can think you’re living on the coast of California but of course you’re not."Israel has fallen short," he says, seeing itself as the underdog and victim in the Middle East when, in his eyes, it is the dominant power with an obligation toward those living under its rule.
"No degree of suffering gives you an eternal passport to ride roughshod over another people," he said.
"Israel has won. Who’s the loser? What scrap of dignity is the Palestinian people going to salvage from all this? They’re not going away, and Israel needs to deal with that reality."
This is important. Israel has no idea what is going on in the territories. Roane Carey, the Nation magazine editor who lived in Israel for the last three months, explained this to me in Gaza; and I observed it for myself when I visited Israel, three years back. Willful ignorance. Makes Jews here all the more responsible.
Good morning Phil. Reconciliation is the ticket to improving Palestinians' lives. Distrust is so rampant, that even elements of Netanyahu's stated agenda (trade) that would be genuinely helpful, if incomplete, are rejected. Israel says "we won't negotiate with you on anything unless you use the phrase "Israel – the Jewish State"". Hamas won't negotiate unless literal 67 borders are on the table. The PA won't negotiate unless the talks are comprehensive, end-game. And the decibel community eggs on the opposition to reconciliation, rather than facilitates the unilateral actions that help, one leg of a foundation at a time.
For those so interested there's a somewhat topical and anyway very good article in the Jerusalem Post today arguing the Israelis haven't really faced the big questions involved in the conflict and that it's time they should. The goodness of the article would also seem to be enhanced simply by it being in the Post: http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=124437...
Mr. Whitty: "Israel says "we won't negotiate with you on anything unless you use the phrase "Israel – the Jewish State"". Hamas won't negotiate unless literal 67 borders are on the table. The PA won't negotiate unless the talks are comprehensive, end-game. ' This is all a hangover from the Bush negotiating position. We need to stop pretending that people need to meet pre-conditions before they start talking. If the endgame is really in sight, we probably will all be amazed how flexible the players really are. The talking is the dynamic. And the more we talk, the harder and harder it is to sustain demonic, counterproductive caractures. Of all of his nefarious influences on the world, the worst Bush-ism was the belief that we must agree before we even start talking. He used it solely as means to abort negotiations. I might suggest to you that you jettison it from your mind. Bushism is cancerous.
Correct. Wexler, Mr Crafty, agrees with Shrub, assuming what is yet to be negotiated, and calling it sincere forward motion towards peace, as has been pointed out on the comments to another recent thread on this blog. Israel having laid down the settlements, and having erected the Wall–both illegal and against official USA policy, the hand that feeds Israel, the ostensible zionist Obama supporters differ little from Shrub's zionist supporters.
Yes, that article you reference does raise interesting and acute questions. Why do I come away from it feeling that those questions will never be addressed until much more violence forces the issue?
I'm afraid I agree with you my friend. Still, if ever there is an end to this, it will have had a start somewhere, and I suspect it will look something like this with even the readers of the J' Post coming to grips with the reality that something has to be done.
"Rosenblatt wanted to make sure Cohen is Jewish." It must irritate these shadow government American Jewish Zionists no end that their nation now has its own internal subversive movement. Rosenblatt apparently still can't believe that any authentic Jew would put American interests before those of Israel or the Diaspora virtual nation.
"Israel has no idea what is going on in the territories. " Of course it does, Israelis face mandatory military service, they know. All this faux-naivete is nonsense.
Phil, re your comment that Roger Cohen, "said that Gaza had transformed his view of the Middle East (Iraq did it for us here)." Some of us have been reporting developments in the occupied territories for a LOT longer than the launch of the Iraq war. It would be nice if we could get a bit more respect for our whole body of work from you new "converts"? After all, the situation of Israel using gross structural, economic, and physical violence against Palestinians inside and outside the occupied territories did not start at the point that you woke up to it in 2003!
I find it hard to believe that most Israelis are clueless about creeping ethnic cleansing and colonization in the OPT. I think most are aware of it and either support it, don't care as long as they are not directly affected, maintain a comfortable willful ignorance, a polite euphemism for moral cowardice, or (the largest category I hope) feel personally powerless to help fix a complex problem whose solution is not clear to them when they themselves feel under threat. Leadership is needed to organize the latter group before it shrinks to irrelevance.
Cohen is definitely playing into the racist stereotype that "they" suffer from a "primitive" fixation on "honor". However, Obama facilitated this by mentioning "humiliation" in his Cairo speech. A good general principle in psychological warfare is this, and you can see it every day in the Jewish press: subjectivise your opponent – focus on his subjective feelings. They have been doing this with Assad fils for years. Do the exact reverse with your own side: present it as a model of objectivity.
HUMILIATION = loss of DIGNITY
I don't normally toot my own horns, but I was a subscriber to Alfred Lilienthal's newsletter in the early 70s. TOOT! TOOT!
Without taking away from Phil, Helen is right. She and a lot of us have been on this for a long time. At first any one that opposed what was happening had to bear up under the anti semites slur and worse, now not so much. Now the "self hating jews" seem to be enemy number one for the fanatics. Welcome to the club.
The interviewer reinforces my new view that the terms anti semitism and bigot should be replaced with "tribalism and tribalist".__Glen Greenwald has an excellent put down on this tribalism at his blog.____Israel and zionist?…they are in the same place the Germans were. I think Gaza impressed everyone, including Obama, with the urgency of halting this.____"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands__will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and__worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and__smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if,__let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the__‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of__course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of__little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to__be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you__did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step__D.
"…what he describes as a willful ignorance among Israelis of their reality and responsibility." They "can't handle the truth"!
Big brother says my comment was too long, hence the screwed up up post. Point was……if you have read Milton Mayers ".."They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45" you see that the Israeli society is where the Germans were. "On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined. "Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair."
IMO, this goes back to Jews being a minority in the Christian West, and professing to believe that all non-Jewish Westerners' criticism of their ways must be motivated by superstitious Christian doctrine hostile to Jews, even when it was due to loathsome organized Jewish behavior. Their pose of “objectivity” allowed them to simultaneously rationalize their own loathsome behavior and sit in judgment of their gentile critics for being motivated by bias, kind of like O.J. claiming the murder trial prosecutors were motivated by racism because any objective analysis of the case would conclude his obvious innocence. He probably even came to believe that self-serving pose. Organized Jewry in its Zionist manifestation has undergone a similar process of self-delusion, and hase come to believe that its critics are all motivated by anti-Semitism or Jewish self hatred. On a sidebar, partisan hacks of the Statist Left and Right and in media have also adopted this persecuted and (pseudo) objective pose in order to rationalize the loathsome essence of their own pathetic and warped ideologies.
Ed, the British, the French, and the US all claimed to be the arbiters of objectivity during the haydays of their respective empires, though you could claim that all these empires were really driven from behind the scenes by Jewish international finance.If you read the ancient Romans, you will find they were adopting the pose of objectivity before either Jews or Christians had impacted their culture in any way at all. It's just a normal imperial affectation — "we have a privileged contact with transcendental, objective reality, everyone else is driven by instinct alone." In our own day, Evola tried to revive this imperial stance of transcendental objectivity (and he's good at it, too), and he was an out-and-out pagan.
If Israel is indeed a wealthy society as Roger Cohen contends, then why must hard pressed US taxpayers give them billions of dollars every year? All Jewish israelis have medical insurance — something 45 million Americans do not have.
Dear Helena Cobban, I've been reading your blog for several years now. somehow I have the feeling that you were part of the foreign desk in Beirut for the Christian Science Monitor which I followed avidly through the 80's. I appreciate your work. Thank you. jim byers
That's why the only rational course for humanity is libertarianism. Those who want to cling to their delusions of righteousness, superiority and objectivity can stick to their own cults and not impose what others may regard as warped upon everyone else. Authoritarian political and religious cultists (Leftists, Right-wingers, Zionists, Islamists…and yes, authoritarian Christians) have no right to force anyone to adopt their values, ethics, morals, or way of life. If they want to expand their influence, let them proselytize. Instead, they want to take the lazy man's authoritarian Statist route. This will always make their “authority” over coerced “adherents” hollow, artificial, and unnatural.
If the Jews, for example, had to pay for their own Zionist initiative instead of forcing others to subsidize it by utilizing authoritarian Washington Statism as an apparatus, they'd still be clinging to the coast line. The problem really fly when peculiar, incompetent and stunted people who would otherwise fade into history demand that others endorse, embrace, subsidize, and sustain their peculiar cults, lifestyles, and political systems even though they can’t stand on their own two feet and thus by rights of natural law should fade into history.
Roger Cohen of the NY Times is the Walter Duranty of the 21st century. The president of the United States is Barack Obama because ALL of the idiotic Left voted for him (Cohen being one of the dumbest) and most of the idiotic college students who could not explain Left from Right (much less Jacobins). I'm sure Mr. Cohen truly believes the lopsided elections in Iran yesterday were free, fair and honest. With a Jew like him, who needs white supremecists? Read James Taranto's piece on Cohen (and David Leonhardt, another NYT idiot) in American Spectator, WSJ and OpinionJournal.com. Betcha Cohen can't refute the arguments made against him. My 15 year old son could debate this guy and tie him up into knots. Oh, and by the way, Hamas cannot even negotiate with the PA, but Israel is supposed to negotiate with…..whom? Matthew Kremer matthew765@aol.com email me with your left b.s., I dare you.
OT: Leniency for AIPAC leaker http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0609/23671.h... Words fail me.
Gee, I seem to recall that the UN offered the Arabs their share and the Jews their share and the result was an Arab invasion, followed by Jordanian control (dare I say "occupation"?) of the so-called West Bank, with Egypt taking Gaza and later refusing Israel's offer to give Gaza back to the Egyptians. Hamas and the PA can't produce peace between themselves; how do you expect Israel to achieve peace with "Palestinians"? After billions of UN (i.e., US) dollars to prop up the non-state, how does one explain that someone from Gaza or the West Bank needs to go to Israel for work and wages? Just what is the widow Arafat living on in Paris? If the Jews retreated to Tel Aviv, and left all else to the Arabs, the Arabs would attack Tel Aviv. You're just another Walter Duranty. Matt Kremer
Wrong. Any person (American, Jewish, Zionist or whatever) just can't believe how dumb the Left is and not just when it comes to Israel. You're so dumb you don't even know that U.S. interests in the Middle East do, long term, depend upon a strong Israel. Had a nice big glass of kool-aid lately? Guess so.
I'd be very surprised if an IDF solder, serving in the occupied West Bank, comes home for leave and tells his mother, "Yeah, the work is great. I knee-capped a Palestinian grandfather yesterday and shot a kid in the face with a gas grenade."
But, Ed, I have already pointed out that, in the absence of government, the existing industrial moguls and commercial tycoons will simply create their own police forces, territorial militias, and after not very long, their own expeditionary armies — in other words, government will be back in all but name, and without any of the checks and balances of so-called 'democracy'. You know this; that's why you didn't reply when I said it before.
"If the Jews retreated to Tel Aviv, and left all else to the Arabs, the Arabs would attack Tel Aviv." Gosh, that's too bad. Not my problem, tho. Why didn't the Zionists think of that before they drove out the British. You Zionists are lying in the bed you made. As a Jew, I feel a lot of sympoathy for you. As an American I tell you again: that's your problem. It's not my problem as an American, and I'm not going to sacrifice Judaism to your crazy land-theft scheme.
A silly response, Matt. Its not about winning debates. Its about Israel's survival frankly.
No, Rowan, never! Moderate Christian ethics and reverence for the cross will keep that from happenning! And if it does "the rest of us" (Ed's army) will put a stop to it. Now, if you are talking about "glibertarianism", which is the correct name for what Ed espouses, I'm all for it. And of course, Ed is a strict adherent to the first and prime directive of glibertarianism: Run away when they ask you questions based on common experience. Tell the magic hand of the free market always jerks you off, and it never spanks.
we are in awe of your 'bravery'. what next – your address, picture and perhaps those the son whom you drag into your foolishness? my friend, nobody is interested in contacting you by email or otherwise outside of this forum where you can have all the exchange you need. finally, if you have issues with (a real hero) cohen last i checked he works for the times. maybe he will grant you (or your son) audience.
I’m not an anarchist; I acknowledge the need for minimal government that is constitutionally grounded. In my view, a small elite of the best and brightest from all religious, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds and creeds would be essential to guard the constitutional principles, and the ethics and integrity of the government, and carry out its limited purview with the highest competence and honor. They would be highly paid, duty bound, and beyond reproach. Membership would be a national honor. Think samurai and Bushido. But in addition to carrying out the few constitutional duties of government, one of their key roles would also be to fiercely limit its scope so that it doesn’t become what we have now: the modern day equivalent to the corrupt, pre-Reformation Church, only many times more unscrupulous, and with much more power than the Church ever had.
The Israelis keep moving the goal posts.MR yahoo said that Iran must be delt with first.And i guess when that is done pakistan need to be delt with and so on.This charade is been going on for sixty years. From occupation to illegal settelments ,from settelments to out posts to illegal posts to natural and unnatural growth. but one dayThe israeli illusionist will run out of tricks.
How so? Certainly Metternich wouldn't agree with you.
During the last days of the Mandate the Jews pushed back the partition line (already covering more land then demographically deserved) by land grab, declared their state, pushed back more; the Arabs attacked them mostly only when they were in the Palestinian side. After trillions of dollars and every sort of lop-sided support additional to those free dollars, Israel is still a welfare state, always shaking its tin cup for more US tax dollars, subsidies, special agreements, etc. If the Arabs always left Israel to do whatever it wants Israel would now be much larger than it is.
At whatever cost to the USA of course.
from the Angry Arab web site: SATURDAY, JUNE 13, 2009 AIPAC spies free again! "For those who missed it (because it is not being reported in the MSM) Larry Franklin, the Pentagon AIPAC spy who pleaded guilty and was sentenced to twelve years in prison, has had his sentence reduced to probation and ten months of community confinement, which is presumed to be some kind of halfway house or possibly freedom to stay at home with some kind of monitoring bracelet. The adjustment was made last night by the same judge who let Rosen and Weissman go free in the AIPAC trial that was recently terminated without a conviction. Franklin did zero prison time as he was allowed to stay out of jail because of his willingness to testify in the trial. According to Franklin’s lawyer, Plato Cacheris the poor man has been having a rough time lately as no one wants to hire him… Cacheris ain’t cheap. Wonder who paid the bill?"
This comment is the smartest thing I have read all day.