The revelation in David Frum’s opening argument– in a debate with Dan Levy at the Economist over the US role re Israel/Palestine– is what a Bible-thumping religious-nationalist Frum is re Israel. His mother Barbara was the same way, as a Canadian broadcaster, I’m told, and the son says things in the Economist that he never said in An End to Evil, his manifesto for regime change in the Arab world, or in the speeches he slipped on to George W. Bush’s teleprompter:
The aspiration for a Jewish homeland specifically in the Holy Land of the Bible is rooted not in persecution, but in a thousand years of Jewish political sovereignty, more than 3,000 years of spiritual and religious connection, and now more than 150 years of modern resettlement of the ancient land. This resettlement was legally recognised in the treaties and commitments that followed the first world war, not the second.
Frum goes on to say that Jerusalem must be Jewish because you can’t trust the Muslims’ aspirations for Jerusalem after you read their religious texts.
Obama’s error is "pledging American prestige to unachievable goals, miscalculating priorities." And what was the Iraq war that Frum pushed? What was the effect on American prestige? And did those plans flow from Frum’s belief that America’s role is to protect Israel’s "substantive security needs," as he says here? I guess so. Because those security needs entail colonization. Frum:
Even supposing a Palestinian state were a pressing and desirable outcome from a US point of view, it is important to recognise that the most significant obstacles to such an outcome arise within the Palestinian national community. Settlements are the consequence of Arab and Palestinian intransigence, not the cause.
Too bad he didn’t throw in Judea and Samaria while he was at it. Here Frum referred to the "Palestinian areas of Israel." I want more secular outrage. Remember how liberal Jews used to respond when fundamentalist Christians got their hands on the steering wheel?
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“The aspiration for a Jewish homeland specifically in the Holy Land of the Bible is rooted not in persecution, but in a thousand years of Jewish political sovereignty, more than 3,000 years of spiritual and religious connection, and now more than 150 years of modern resettlement of the ancient land. This resettlement was legally recognised in the treaties and commitments that followed the first world war, not the second.”
This appears to be the new tack, dropping the Holocaust as a justification, and resorting instead to ancient texts and history. Tony Karon noted the same type of new argument from Foxman.
Karon:
“Ever since Obama’s Cairo speech, Foxman’s concerns have become more pronounced. It’s not that the Anti Defamation League president didn’t take heart from Obama’s insistence that Israel’s security is sacrosanct; or that “he made strong statements against anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.” No, his concern — among others — was that Obama should have “made clear that Israel’s right to statehood is not a result of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust.””
…
He ends with this:
Still, having told the world and the majority of Jews who live in it that Israel was the answer to the Holocaust and the inheritor of the mantle of the survivors (a contestable claim, to be sure, but you only have to look at the fact that Germany paid most of its “reparations” not to the survivors themselves, but to Israel), Foxman et al are going to have a hard time pivoting to the narrative of Biblical redemption. For starters, most of the world’s Jews don’t buy such bubbemeis. And you’re going to have a hard time getting American Jews and most Western countries to accept the idea that the Palestinians’ epic suffering has been inflicted simply in the name of a distortion of Biblical fantasy.
Essentially, the problem they face is that an ideological construct of their own making is no longer serving its purpose of ensuring a blank check for Israel’s endless dispossession of the Palestinians. The bad news, of course, is that justifying that dispossession on the basis of a Biblical narrative is going to get even fewer takers in America, of any persuasion.”
Good article, worth a read.
Obama, Foxman and Israel’s Purpose
Anyone see that Johnny Depp movie: FRUM HELL?
sorry. the new layout is so effervescent!
David Frum is just reiterating the Judea Pearl criticism of Obama: From Epistemic to Bureaucratic Islamophobia.
If continued Jewish “presence” in Palestine, no matter how tenuous, gives Jews the right to reclaim Palestine, then Native Americans have a greater right to reclaim what they lost. The Native Americans haven’t been in a tiny minority nearly as long as the Jews were a tiny minority in Palestine (200 years vs 2000 years). And while the Palestinians had done nothing to repress the Jews during most of their 2000-year hiatus in Europe, the Native Americans have been continuously repressed by those who took their land.
Weiss: “I want more secular outrage. Remember how liberal Jews used to respond when fundamentalist Christians got their hands on the steering wheel?”
You won’t get it, because the liberal establishment is not secular at all, but Judeophile, philo-Semitic, Jewish supremacist…whatever you want to call it — even more so than the Christian Zionist GOP. In fact, the latter are so pathetic they have to conflate Christianity with Judaism into “Judeo-Christianity” in a desperate coattails-grab, and they still can’t get anything but contempt from the liberal establishment and Jewish dominated MSM. Meanwhile, organized Judaism engages in the most vile, institutionally racist, greedy and power-grabbing conduct in both America and the Levant, and the liberal establishment doesn’t bat an eye.
Keith Olbermann? Rachel Maddow? Still so obsessing, and righteously indignant over long-gone “Christians” Bush and Palin, but mum’s the word when it comes to Judeofascism which is still spitting in the world’s face and was the primary ideology behind the Bush doctrine and the McCain campaign anyway. They know where their bread is buttered. The entire corrupt liberal establishment knows. But they do really good “progressive” P.R., don’t they? It’s all part of the deception, the illusion.
yeah, They are the liberal champs of the day. What a society.
If you don’t speak of it it doesn’t exist, correct?
Frum is a pompous ass. I used to enjoy listening to NPR’s Marketplace, but I can’t now that he’s allowed to spew his hollow neoliberal economic fantasies on it.
Congratulations on the new look, very professional and businesslike.
From comments to Khaleej Times: Israel Steals Palestinian Heritage, History.
Reuse of gentilics or demonyms is hardly unusual in the European context, and Patrick J. Geary summarizes practice in The Myth of Nations, The Medieval Origins of Europe, pp. 118-119. His analysis applies at least as much to the term Jew (יְהוּדִי) as it applies to any European ethnic name.
Probably no greater fraud has ever been perpetrated in the history of the human race than Zionism.
For more details on this aspect of Zionist fraud, see Every Israel Advocate a Madoff.
RE: “…dropping the Holocaust as a justification, and resorting instead to ancient texts and history…”
MY COMMENT: This is being done because Israel within the ‘Green Line’ is generally seen as fulfilling the Holocaust justification but does not justify Israel’s keeping the West Bank. Consequently, they are now adopting the “rational” used by the nuttiest of the West Bank settlers.
PS. Of course, if the “Biblical rationale” justifies Israel’s keeping the West Bank, then it would also seem to justify Israel’s taking control of (depending on Biblical interpretations) southern Lebanon, much of Syria, Jordan, half of Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, The Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, other parts of Egypt, and God* only knows what else. And since Judaism is thought to have actually originated in Persia, perhaps Israel should also claim Iran!
* or more likely, the “Reverend” John Hagee
What do you expect from a professional liar and propagandist who stil thinks Paul Wolfowitz is a guru.
Frun’s belief in the aspiration for a Jewish homeland contradicts Hetzl’s own.
A thousand years of Jewish political sovereignty? In which universe?
More than 3,000 years of spiritual and religious connection? The Jews didn’t get to Israel until 2,500 years ago.
150 years of modern resettlement of the ancient land. So why then, wer the Ziniist founders reporting to the Peel Comission that the place was already heavily populated and needed to be ethnically cleansed before a Jwish homeland was possible?
You know when Frum is lying. His lips are moving.
King David had his capital in Jerusalem 3,000 years ago. Israel was a Jewish state much before that, as well.
ShingoLiar is also ShingoInnumerate! Having problems with numbers more than 1 digit in length?
SEE: “Ancient Israeli Myths Deter Peace”, By Robert Parry, 07/09/09
(EXCERPT) The rationale for formally designating Israel a Jewish state – as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu now demands – rests on three religious-political pillars: God’s purported covenant with Moses instructing the ancient Israelites to conquer the land, the injustice of the Roman-era Diaspora that supposedly removed them centuries later, and the brutal persecution of European Jews in the Holocaust.
Yet, two of these pillars – Moses conveying God’s covenant to the Israelites and the Roman Diaspora – appear based on almost no historical reality, the stuff of legend and possibly even lies that crumble under any serious scrutiny.
Normally, such ancient stories might be regarded as harmless tales that some people treasure as part of their Judeo-Christian faiths, except that Netanyahu’s new demand means that these myths now threaten peace in the Middle East and conceivably could push the modern world into more bloody warfare. Therefore, they must be given fresh examination….
ENTIRE ARTICLE - http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/070809.html
ALSO SEE: “Zionist nationalist myth of enforced exile: Israel deliberately forgets its history”, by Schlomo Sand
An Israeli historian suggests the diaspora was the consequence, not of the expulsion of the Hebrews from Palestine, but of proselytising across north Africa, southern Europe and the Middle East
(EXCERPT)…But during the 1980s an earthquake shook these founding myths. The discoveries made by the “new archaeology” discredited a great exodus in the 13th century BC. Moses could not have led the Hebrews out of Egypt into the Promised Land, for the good reason that the latter was Egyptian territory at the time. And there is no trace of either a slave revolt against the pharaonic empire or of a sudden conquest of Canaan by outsiders.
Nor is there any trace or memory of the magnificent kingdom of David and Solomon. Recent discoveries point to the existence, at the time, of two small kingdoms: Israel, the more powerful, and Judah, the future Judea. The general population of Judah did not go into 6th century BC exile: only its political and intellectual elite were forced to settle in Babylon. This decisive encounter with Persian religion gave birth to Jewish monotheism.
Then there is the question of the exile of 70 AD. There has been no real research into this turning point in Jewish history, the cause of the diaspora. And for a simple reason: the Romans never exiled any nation from anywhere on the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean. Apart from enslaved prisoners, the population of Judea continued to live on their lands, even after the destruction of the second temple. Some converted to Christianity in the 4th century, while the majority embraced Islam during the 7th century Arab conquest….
Shlomo Sand is professor of history at Tel Aviv university and the author of Comment le people juif fut inventé (Fayard, Paris, 2008)
ENTIRE ARTICLE – http://mondediplo.com/2008/09/07israel
Barbara may well have been a Zionist, but as a long-time fan who never missed an edition of her *Journal* on CBC, I can say that she never let her Zionism interfere with her reporting. Her coverage of the 1982 Lebanon war and her interviews with Anne Medina, the CBC reporter on the ground in Beirut, were superb. Thanks in part to Barbara, Canadians had a much more realistic conception of what was going on in the Middle East.
I’m not at all sure if Barbara, who is best described as a bourgeois liberal (a “blue dog” by American standards), would entirely approve of the positions taken by two of her three kids — David and Linda — stuffy little self-satisfied conservative brats, perhaps typical of kids who were brought up in the stuffy wealth of Rosemont.
I still miss Barbara.
The same Frum who described the settlements as ‘trailer parks, ramshackle things’ is this bloggingheads clip with Gershom Gorenberg:
http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/17943?in=35:55&out=36:13
Richard Weiss:
re. your attempt to besmirch memory of Barbara Frum. Once again, via a little inaccurate aside, you belie your claims to journalism.
Well at least you can claim to get both minor and the major facts wrong.
I’ve just read the first couple of paragraphs in Frum’s opening statement:
Iranian nuclear weapons? Check
Anti-Semitism? Check
Holocaust? Check
Nuclear-Armed Iranian Holocaust-denying Anti-Semitism? Check, Check and Check
PHIL(L): I really like that new picture of you that accompanies this post. You don’t look as scrawny as you do in the photo over at TPM. It’s nice to finally see you smiling even if it does remind me of the goofy look one often sees on the faces of those ‘born again’ types (e.g. Pat Boone).
I believe the photo you are referring to with the smiling Gent having a goofy look, is actually a photo of the subject of the post (Mr. Frum) rather than the author of the post (Mr Weiss). I trust that this clarifies the matter.
Well now, I’m off to evening tea. Everyone have the pleasantest of evenings!
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