A piece assailing Shlomo Sand’s book on the Invention of the Jewish People in the New York Times the other day drew this applause from Andrew Silow-Carroll of the New Jersey Jewish News:
The debate – and the Jews – are well served by [Patricia] Cohen’s piece, which eschews “objective” news reporting for analysis. If done as a straight-forward news story, the reporter would have been obligated to offer “equal time” to the other side of the argument – X says this, but Y says this. The Times did this in covering the “intelligent design” debate – in trying to appear objective, they put ID “experts” on an equal footing with genuine biologists and “balanced” the overwhelming evidence of the scientific method with folklore.
I think we should thank Cohen for not bowing to the false god of objectivity.
The New York Times would apparently rather deal with angry letters from the "intelligent design" advocates who don’t read the NY Times anyway, than with the tens of thousands of Jews who do.
Hopefully this new film may begin to awaken people to the realities of Israel and the manipulation of diaspora Jews:
Defamation
I’ve been wanting to watch this for some time now. Does anyone know how to get a legal copy? Netflix doesn’t carry it, and Youtube took the full version down ostensibly due to copyright problems.
In the United States? Good luck. I can’t even get region 1 DVDs of Blake’s 7, and that’s merely 80′s British sci-fi. You can forget about distribution of something like this in the US in any commercial channel, very probably.
I love Blake’s 7! The final scene was a quite a shock, I foolishly expecting a formulaic Hollywood happy ending.
So we have Witty attacking “justice” on one end and Mr. Silow-Carroll attacking “objectivity” on the other. Any other pillars of modern civilization you Zionists would like to pull down?
I wondered if S-Carroll had really read Cohen’s review, which under the semblance of a critique of Sand supports him on many points and is strangely silent on others – it is agreed that there was no mass expulsion after 70 post-Titus and nothing is said about any expulsion after 135 post-Hadrian. Sand seems only to be reflecting Israeli academia in a general move away from expulsionism. Which is to the credit of Israeli academia, though as so often academics speak in a quiet voice until someone like Sand amplifies things, and at that point they say that it’s really no big deal and the propagandists think that they might as well go on thinking what they always thought. Whereas in fact, considering Zionist ideology, the deal is not so small.
There was an exhibition about Hadrian at the British Museum last year which took a strongly expulsionist line. I couldn’t find any way of contacting the organisers to ask what authority, ancient or even modern, they had.
One of my enthusiasms is trying to expose the true multiculturalism of the ancient world which the nationalisms of our time, Zionism most of all I think, misrepresent. The ancient Palestinians need our help as well as their modern counterparts.
Blakes 7 was very good – a credit to our British imagination, I certainly hope you’ll agree. At the end they have some primordial-type creatures who turn out not to be primordial but ‘what we will become’. One of the most profound philosophical questions to be addressed in popular fiction. When I think of the absence of mass expulsions from ancient Palestine and the reality of mass expulsion these days the pessimism of B7 seems to be illustrated.
Strangely enough, Blake’s 7 was one of the formative shows I watched as a kid. Local public television carries a number of BBC shows, and when I was growing up, Doctor Who and Blake’s 7 were among them. It was a deeply pessimistic show but it did sow some seeds of optimism — take for instance, the events leading up to the second season cliff-hanger (yes, I’m being very careful of spoilers, just in case). One of the phenomenal aspects of the show is that it broke so many conventions of television story telling, much to its credit.
I like what you’ve said about the ancient Palestinians needing help as much as modern ones. Both have been slandered as a matter of political expedience and you find racist language against them, and against Arabs and even Muslims generally, veritably encoded into Western dialog now.