The last it feels ends a circle movement started in the first. If you do not agree with Blankfort you are a fascist. Get over yourself? Deny whatever you are, your specific outlook, your ethics your, perspective? Your Jewishness?

I understand the urgency and pain in everything he writes between this start and end. But strictly the “fasicist” connects with the “totalitarian” demand in the last. There is only one way to see matters, the way Blankfort does.

the negative aspect of “crowd”, the manipulated, the vigilantilee crowd, looking for revenge without checking if the suspect is the guilty, the crowd enforcing conventions, negating other views or perspectives on life.

the positive aspect of “crowd”, the creative crowd, many know more than each single member, the people creating the net, people sharing their wisdom

Does he [jack] believe that “affirming peace between Israel and Palestine” is a substitute for justice

David Samel reminded me last week of a great phrase written in a March 1919 petition to President Wilson by 38 powerful and wealthy American Jews who objected to Zionism. ‘The rights of other creeds and races will be respected under Jewish dominance’ is the assurance of Zionism, but the keynotes of democracy are neither condescension nor tolerance, but justice and equality.

Is the notion that targeting all of Israeli society and less ethical than it was to target South Africa whose crimes against its indigenous black population, as horrible as those were, have been exceeded in their ferocity and matched in their sadism by Israel in what it’s democratically elected government and citizen army have done to the Palestinians?

If there is any question as to the culpability of the majority of the Israeli population in this, it should have been put to rest by the reports that 94% of Israeli Jews supported the onslaught on Gaza while only a relative handful demonstrated against it.

Does Jack really share with Waskow the belief that “anger and disgust ” against Israel are unwarranted? Does he believe that “affirming peace between Israel and Palestine” is a substitute for justice, a word that doesn’t seem to appear in the lexicon of the Waskows of this world?

Does Jack really share with Waskow that there is ANY possibility of “bringing power to bear on changing U.S. governmental policy,” given the power of the Zionist Lobby over both the White House and Congress?

What needs to be recognized is that, having waited for years for the US solidarity movement (a world class joke to this point) to do something positive besides fruitlessly waving signs and shouting “End the occupation!” or “Two states for two peoples!,” the Palestinians themselves have taken the lead in the BDS campaign and it is where one stands onthis issue that has become the dividing line between those who are seeking justice for the Palestinians as opposed to those who are willing to see them pacified. Waskow is clearly among the latter.

And as Ehrens said, BDS is a tactic and should be debated on whether it would be effective or not. I don’t know. Some people I respect oppose it (Waskow is on that list, having read his article). The fact that some others oppose it who have hypocritical double standards on the subject is a reason to criticize people like that (one of whom we all know), but I don’t let the hypocritical arguments get in the way of considering the real ones a sincere opponent could make.

It used to be the standard insult in political discussions over here in Germany, whenever you begged to differ, by pointing out problems in a specific perspective.

Admittedly, I am not sure if Richard with his constant generalizations about “the left” somehow attracts these kind of insults. If this is the source of your anger, it would help if you addressed it directly, when it occurs, when it makes you angry. The most interesting phenomenon in the “crowd’s mind perspective” may be that it ultimately eliminates purely ideological perspectives. In my youth the crowd with its trend to enforce uniformity, conventions had a very different feeling to it. For me the use of the term fascist more easily connects with that aspect of the “crowd”.