I was scheduled to be a panelist on an event in May at the Jewish Library in San Francisco-- "Reclaiming Jewish Activism." After a library funder, the Bureau of Jewish Education, found out I was on the panel, the news traveled up to the Jewish Federation which put pressure on the Library to cancel the event because I was too controversial--apparently because of the Jewish Community Relations Council of San Francisco guidelines re BDS.
The whole audacious narrative is described in the eloquent detail in the letter attached and also posted online (link to www.scribd.com). The team of event planners and panelists (including me) sent the letter to the Jewish Library this week as well as to the Federation and other partners.
Today we are making this letter public. I want to share this with the hope that people will expose this blatant censorship and silencing of dissent. This follows on the heels of the Peter Beinart event being cancelled here in the Bay Area. Reut Institute was right - the Bay Area is on the frontlines for this issue!
Luckily we found an alternate Jewish location in SF to host the event - synagogue Sha'ar Zahav.
RE: “the news traveled up to the Jewish Federation which put pressure on the Library to cancel the event because I was too controversial” ~ Rae Abileah
MY COMMENT: And yet, the Jewish Federations apparently consider “Pastor” John Hagee to be “oh so kosher”! If that don’t beat all.
SEE: Houston Jewish Federation, Jewish Agency Fund Im Tirzu’s Assault on Israeli Universities ~ by Richard Silverstein, Tikun Olam, 3/17/10
ENTIRE ARTICLE – link to richardsilverstein.com
ALSO SEE: Pastor Hagee: The Antichrist Is Gay, “Partially Jewish, As Was Adolph Hitler”, by Max Blumenthal, Huffington Post, 6/02/08
LINK – link to huffingtonpost.com
P.S. God bless synagogue Sha’ar Zahav!
Breaking news: Jewish library bans thinking. Great headline you guys. Where are you headed with this policy?
Thanks for the article about the battle over which types of Jewish activism are acceptable to the Jewish Community Relations Council, and which types of activism are not acceptable. This particular battle illuminates a larger issue. A decade or two ago, American Jews supported Israel, with rare exceptions. Now, Israel is a divisive issue, and the San Francisco battle is a case in point. The days of monolithic support for Israel are over.
We’ll learn more about this topic when Norman Finkelstein’s new book is published in late April: “Knowing Too Much: why the American Jewish romance with Israel is coming to an end.” From Finkelstein’s website, his basic argument is as follows:
American Jews are liberals, Israel’s policies are an affront to liberal values, it’s getting harder and harder to disguise Israel’s policies, American Jews are highly educated and can find out the truth about Israel policies. So support for Israel is declining among liberals, including Jewish liberals.
Finkelstein goes on to say that older Jews and orthodox Jews continue to support Israel. However, the majority of US Jews (90%) are not orthodox, and the views of younger Jews will be increasingly dominant as the older generation passes from the scene.
As usual, Finkelstein backs up his opinions with facts and figures.
So why does Norman continue to follow the Chomskyian method of denying the power of the Israel Lobby and it’s role in cementing the American discourse on Israel? Why does he continue to advocate for the ‘two-state solution’ as the only viable ‘solution’ to the conflict?
Norman must realize that the Lobby will continue regardless of the these figures concerning liberalism, orthodoxy, generationalism because JEWISH institutions continue, and have even increased, their connections to the ‘Jewish’ state – both openly(e.g. the CJC(Canadian Jewish Congress) has changed to CIJC(Canada Israel Jewish Center)and through both open and covert funding of Israeli institutions, mostly military and settlement building from what I can tell. By the time his generation gap has come to pass, Israel will have either killed or forcibly removed 6 million Palestinians from Palestine – and God only knows what will happen to countries like Syria – whose main sin seems to be wanting back the Golan Heights as per umpteen UNSC resolutions, or Iran who backs these liberation movements ideologically and militarily. I’m a very big fan of Norman Finkelstein, but I differ on this misplaced optimism and his mild advocation of Zionism based on ‘realism’..
I’m sure Norman Finkelstein appreciates the power of the Israel Lobby, since Alan Dershowitz campaigned successfully to deny Finkelstein tenure at DePaul University. The Lobby destroyed Finkelstein’s academic career.
The Chomsky/Finkelstein thesis is that US policy in the Middle East is not all that different from US foreign policy in (say) Latin America. In either part of the world, the US wants reliable “allies” (really puppets) that are integrated into the US empire. The US rewards “good guy” dictators (Mubarek in Egypt, the Shah in Iran, Karzai in Afghanistan, Somoza in Nicaragua, Batista in Cuba, Pinochet in Chile, etc.), while punishing “bad guy” dictators or democrats (Castro in Cuba, Chavez in Venezuela, Nasser in Egypt, Mossadegh in Iran) etc. Iran made a revolution and defected from the US empire, and that is their truly unforgivable sin.
If US policy isn’t dramatically different in the Middle East, then the Israel Lobby is not hijacking an otherwise benign policy.
The US and Israel have a common interest in suppressing Arab nationalism. That’s the real basis for the US/Israeli alliance. Naturally, for public consumption, the emphasis is on the common US & Israeli devotion to “democracy”. And here Mondoweiss does a good job in describing how “democratic” Israel really isn’t, especially for Palestinians.
Let me make a constructive suggestion: read the new Finkelstein book when it comes out later this month.
“The US and Israel have a common interest in suppressing Arab nationalism. ”
That’s where most of the controversey comes from: not everybody agrees with this point – or how that dynamic plays out. I like Finkelstein alot – as I did Chomsky at one point. I just don’t think it explains anywhere near adequately the complex reasons for American foreign policy decisions. Or the complex political relationships that constitute government institutions. And the sometimes subtle ways in which these political relationships change over time and beyond the quise of corporate media commentary.
Nobody says there’s anything ‘benign’ about American foreign policy – but’s its not enough to simply say that because two policies resemble each other that both come from the same source. In reality they don’t. American foreign policy is determined by the players in the government. In recent times this means corporate players have been determining the foreign policy direction of the U.S – not some dated, theoretical musings.
Most of the policies you mention are Cold War policies. Which were certainly as immoral as the Zionist ones that now determine U.S foreign policy direction. But they are history.
I’ve read all of Finkelstein’s books – what’s the ‘new one’? And what would your point be, exactly?
American Jews have hijacked liberalism just as neocons hijacked Conservatism.
Marc Lynch on C Span Washington Journal this morning got an earful. Look for CAMERA to go apes– t — especially as C Span aired the segment at least twice, Sunday Apr 1 at 9:18 am and again on Sunday Apr 1 at 6:43 pm link to c-spanvideo.org
Lynch runs the Middle East affairs department at George Washington University and is part of Center for a New American Security. CNAS is the outfit that published the “game changing” strategy on Iran, to which Dennis Ross was the major contributor link to cnas.org
Lynch was on Washington Journal to talk about Syria. His commentary was logically inconsistent — “we don’t have good information about what is going on” and “it’s extremely difficult to know who is doing what, especially in complex urban environments,” but Lynch was slam dunk positive that Assad is a dictator and that he’s killing or has killed thousands of his own people, and Christians and Alawites remain loyal to Assad’s government, which has always protected Christians and Alawites, because they have not yet been convinced that they will be protected if they defect.
Lynch conceded that doing Syria “is not as easy as Libya,” where US was able to slaughter Qaddafi like an animal “without putting boots on the ground.” Not only are leaders that the US doesn’t like dehumanized, so are the soldiers who are sent in to kill them.
Two calls were noteworthy; one at about 20 minutes into the program recited names of witnesses who had information that the US was sending terrorists into Syria from neighboring states.
The second man who called, at about 24 min, cited the situation in which a woman who had been a consul in Middle East went to State Department to report her findings. She was dismayed to observe that one after another after another of the State Dept. Middle East-related offices are staffed by Israelis. The male caller said the State Department is occupied territory, which accounts for the dissonance in US policy, and that Americans should rise up against this untenable set of circumstances.
Word is getting out, and one way or another, onto MSM.
“American Jews have hijacked liberalism just as neocons hijacked Conservatism.”
Let’s slow down there, buddy. If you mean ‘American-Jewish liberal Zionists of the Dershowitz/Goldberg kind”, I’m with you. But American Jews as a masse?
I hope you don’t mean that kind of ugly rhetoric over a whole group of people.
In the US, Jewish inflections regarding liberalism have undercut and overtaken American notions of Classical liberalism.
Please don’t get all huffy about “ugly rhetoric over a whole group of people.”
If the comment had said, “Jews won more Nobel prizes than any other ____,” would you have complained?
Why is it okay to spew “ugly rhetoric” about Muslims “as a masse,” and okay intentionally to starve Palestinians, Iraqis and Iranians “as a masse,” and based upon some of Mooser’s comments, it’s still okay to slam Germans “as a masse,” but one must finely parse the ‘rhetoric’ when talking about a group that self-identifies as inherently separate and apart from.
I agree with the qualifiers here, but I disagree with the blanket statement still.
Who is defining the parameters for what is and is not acceptable?
Zionists.
Zionism is the common factor.
Because the Israel Firsters have so totally hijacked the state department, we now cannot believe a single word of what anyone says about eg, Syria or Mali or China or anything. Since all the israeli Firsters are Jewish, and virtually all the people known to be Jewish in the State department are Israel Firsters, we should conclude that we have no state department capable of serving American interests. So what that means – this is for you Krausss – is that if we hear anyone with Jewish name quoted about any place in the world, we can safely assume it’s something about “what’s good for Israel” first. This also means that the interests of the empire builders have been subverted to serve those of the empire’s vassal.
So naturally, when Hillary talks about human rights anywhere, we can just laugh and wonder whatever does she mean.
For example, there are now more than a few indications that the US, no doubt prodded by Israel, is trying to buy a revolution in Syria. The PTBs looked at what transpired following the Arab Spring in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, and concluded that it’s something they can work with. As for Syria, whatever citizen participation there was in the protests originally, has long since been deflected to serve somebody’s geo-political games.
I recommend reading Moon of Alabama for the latest power plays on this front.
ROFL. The State department? The wholly owned subsidiary of Saudi Arabia? That State Department is pro-Israel? You’ve got it backwards. The State Department is anti-Israel, it’s only the politicians that insist on making pro-Israel policies. Oh, and Qaddafi was killed by Libyans with a U.S. assist in the capture, he wasn’t slaughtered by the U.S.
link to c-spanvideo.org
link to camera.org
h/t Myron Kaplan at CAMERA — thx Myron; typing up ‘scripts is a bore.
PS Phil & M J Rosenberg made it to Front Page Center on CAMERA’s crap-list. Congrats.
Krauss, he or she probably means it exactly as written.
But this kind of thing is stupid, really and embarrassing and counterproductive, especially if you oppose BDS. Let words and ideas flow freely.
You don’t need to tell us, Krauss, we have many representatives here maybe you included? Just as our top representative of the average American Jew our cuddly mascot Moose.
Ah silly me, here I thought that blanket Jew-baiting statements concerning millions of liberal Jews is perhaps the definition of racism – that whole groups are judged on the basis of their identity instead on an individual basis or at least sub-group basis(i.e. Jewish neocons) – is somehow the antithesis of liberal discourse.
Silly me.