From activist and author Winona LaDuke on Facebook:
“…euro-americans in the United States can’t talk about Gaza, because we can’t talk about Israel. Because we can’t talk about the fact that the world is not suffering from a Israeli/Palestinian conflict, but that the world is suffering from the fact that Europe has never been able to deal with it’s ‘Jewish Question’ without some sort of intense barbarity and horror from the Inquisition to the Holocaust. And that Europe, in particular ‘Great’ Britain, the masters of divide an conquer ‘solved’ the problem by supporting the radical, terrorist, extremist Zionists and their mad plan to resettle the ‘homeland.’ We can’t talk about Israel because we can’t talk about Wounded Knee. Because we can’t talk about Sand Creek or Carlisle ‘Boarding School.’ Because we can’t talk about forced sterilization or small pox blankets or Kit Carson and his scorched earth policy in the Southwest. Because we have Andrew Jackson on our twenty dollar bill. Because we are one huge settlement on stolen land. We can’t talk about Israel because we are Israel.”
Nima Shirazi made a similar connection on Mondoweiss here.
I think Winona LaDuke is a star. She’s up there with John Trudell in my opinion. Eloquent people who see the system for what it is and bring their unique cultural insight to the analysis
Of course the US is Israel.
http://www.northernsun.com/Indian-Territory-T-Shirt-%281021%29.html
MURDER as cover for THEFT is *not* SELF-DEFENSE
Actually this is meaningless crap………I could explain why but it would take too long.
Maybe someone else will feel like spending time on it.
Absolutely right on. Winona LaDuke is a treasure.
What always gets my goat is, as a result of all the things “we can’t talk about,” people who have no problem with racist use of Native names and imagery for sports teams and military (they usually tout themselves as being “anti-PC”) actually, with a straight face, think it’s okay because it’s being used to depict them as being “fierce” or “good fighters” or “strong” or other such racist, jingoist nonsense, without even being aware that that argument, itself, is highly racist.
The reduction of a continent’s people to the single attribute in which they stereotypcially interacted with white people (“warrior”) is about as racist as it gets and it doesn’t become less so because one thinks that attribute is somehow a positive thing.
I’m not sure that i agree with Winona. The 19th century, blood and soil philosophies of race, separateness, imperialism, colonialism, apartheid and jim crowe have largely been abandoned by western states. (at least as ideals to be aspired to). People accept multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi racial societies as completely normal, in which the rights of colonizers do not trump the rights of indigenous peoples. Israel is the glaring exception to this rule; zionism is the last of the colonial blood and soil philosophies to still have life in it. Europe has given up nazism, fascism, pan-slavism, etc. Only in israel is the belief in an ethnarchic colonial state still widespread.