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Total number of comments: 14 (since 2009-07-31 19:52:22)

anomalous

Website: http://www.flickr.com/photos/anomalous/sets/522872/

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• It's our wallpaper
  • anomalous July 22, 2011 at 6:32 pm

    David Sax is a total zionist nutter. He used to come to the Union Square pro-Palestine demos to harrass and mock demonstrators, and taunt them with his camera. He posted at least one carefully edited video on youtube to try to paint demonstrators as crazy, adding a comment about me and others: "I think it's funny how people who are trying to come off as peace loving activists are actually the angriest and most hateful people I've ever met. They also lack basic rational thinking. "

• Q: Does Chomsky feel Jewish responsibility for Israel's crimes?
  • anomalous November 18, 2010 at 11:41 am

    I as well am a great admirer of Chomsky for decades. That said, it's always puzzled me that while he takes principled positions of advocacy on most issues of international law and human rights, he seems to make a glaring exception in the matter of Palestine, suggesting that the right of return, while noble and just, is never going to happen, and that the appropriate role of friends of Palestinians should be to help them select goals which are more realistic or pragmatic. He suggests that international Palestine solidarity activists who uncompromisingly support the right of return are ultimately being cruel to Palestinians.

    I am grossly paraphrasing here from materials that are not fresh in my mind, so forgive me if this is a bit imprecise. I don't intend to mischaracterize or besmirch Chomsky, but doesn't this sort of position come across as rather dramatically more patronizing than one would expect from Chomsky on virtually any other issue?

    It is a mark of the respect I feel for Chomsky that I find myself compelled to ask WHY Israel is afforded by Chomsky this unique generosity, and why Palestinians get simultaneously burdened with this unique exemption from justice?

• Uri Avnery is against BDS
  • anomalous September 1, 2009 at 5:31 pm

    I see a lot of this discussion being bogged down in the usual tangential, irrelevant bullshit that zionists like to slather on top of every discussion.

    Uri Avnery is against the boycott movement. As I mentioned above, he is also - and far more importantly, I would say - opposed to the Right of Return. This means that Avnery is, by definition and quite like the vast majority of Israelis, adamantly opposed to the idea that Israel must abide by international law. Why? Because Jews are special. Or in his quaint formulation above: "Peoples are not the same everywhere." This sentiment, unfortunately, shares much in common with that of Rabbi Perrin, who famously announced that "One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail."

    Avnery has maintained that the Right of Return is unacceptable simply because Jews in Israel will not accept it. One has to wonder what kind of person would actually try to argue that the ambient racism of his country somehow magically exempts them from international law and universal standards of human rights. As if there were a right to be racist, and as if that imaginary Jewish right to be racist led to a de facto right to engage in cleansing, or a right to pursue genocide. There is not a right to be racist, just as there is no right of states to create and maintain racial demographics, or to confer political rights on one ethnic group while imposing racial subjugation on all others.

    Apparently it must be reiterated that the problem is not international law or the universal tenets of human rights, but the racism of Jews who endorse zionism.

    The law exists as an alternative to naked violence. To the extent that Israel refuses, decade after decade after decade, to abide by international law, Israel loses the right to object to the application of naked violence against it. The sanctions movement exists as a last-ditch attempt to legitimize Israel - to bring it into some even marginal compliance with universal norms of tolerable conduct.

    I support the sanctions movement, but doubt that it will be sufficient to save Israel from it's own fanatical race towards self-destruction. Why? Because, in the words of the omnipresent racist above, "The Zionist vision will not change." The Zionism plan to seize and ethnically cleanse Palestine led, quite predictably, to the seizure of most of Palestine and the ethnic cleansing of 85% of the non-Jewish populaiton in 1948. This was a criminal, racist and entirely indefensible project then, and it remains so today, even as the criminal land seizure and ethnic cleansing have continued, day after day, over the 60 years since the establishemnt of Israel. This zionist vision will not change, and tribal fanatics around the world, as we can see from the squealing above, will continue to shriek and wail and go ballistic in order to defend that indefensible process until the last non-Jew within a thousand miles in any direction of Israel is dead. As long as Zionism continues to be tolerated as a moral, acceptable political ideology, this conflict will not end, and the animosities and grievances of every one of Israel's neighbors will inevitably continue to grow.

    There will come a point at which we will have to ask ourselves whether continuing to coddle the racial hysteria of this fanatical ultra-minority within a minority - less than one tenth of 1% of the human population - requires the complete paralysis of the entire planet's political, moral and legal apparatus. Do the militant racist fantasies and real estate ambitions of 5 million Jews in Israel really merit this kind of international deference, particularly when we consider the immediate and corrosive effects these fanatical colonists have on the hundreds of millions of non-Jews who have the misfortune of living anywhere in the vicinity of this little ethnic cleansing machine?

    People are free to think whatever disgusting genocidal racist bullshit they want. But people, like states, are not free to engage in ethnic cleansing, genocide, mass racial subjugation, or any of the other goals of the zionist project, withought facing political, legal and moral consequences.

    I understand that Avnery has fought his whole life, without success, for a less overtly genocidal iteration of zionism. He does this, in large part, judging from his own statements, that Jews should be nicer because its good for the jews. This is just racism.

    Avnery's argument, which is basically the argument of that genre of zionism that likes to call itself "post-zionist, or left zionist, is that not only are Jews so special that they get to spray flesh-eating chemical weapons over some of the most densely populated cities on earth, where the average population is about 14; no, Jews are so VERY special that they should be able to do that, and worse, without anyone else on earth saying a peep about it. And if they do, well, they just don't understand how special jews are.

  • anomalous August 30, 2009 at 3:56 pm with 5 replies

    Witty, that is nonsense and as an intelligent person you certainly know that to be the case. I will do you and me both the courtesy of not wasting my breathe on composing the obvious, sane responses to such crap, which you have obviously heard a thousand times and chosen to ignore a thousand times because it offended your belief in the exceptional nature, needs, and rights of Jews.

  • anomalous August 30, 2009 at 3:36 pm

    I'm always perplexed by this attitude people have about Avnery. He's a venerable force, truly an inspiration. But he's still a zionist, and zionism is racism. So OF COURSE he doesn't support sanctions. Of course he doesn't support the idea that Israel should abide by international law. Of course he believes that jews are special, that Israel is special, that Israel should be permitted to act outside the law in whatever way it likes, provided that it declares to be in the racial interests of Jews. Of course he rejects the right of return. His entire life of incredibly courageous political advocacy was dedicated not to human rights, but to Jewish rights, and to zionism. He's a racist in the way that every advocate of zionism is a de facto racist, and he speaks to and for racists, which is why people like Richard Witty declare "Avnery makes sense." I'm not saying that in a shallow, flaming way. We have to be able to make these distinctions which allow us to see the whole spectrum of Jewish racism, which includes the Israeli "left" and much of what passes for the "extreme left", and not just the hideous mess on the far right, which is so patently, horrifically racist that it boggles the mind. Jewish exceptionalism is the problem. I am a great fan of Avnery and think of him as something of a hero, but the fact remains that Avnery, and Avnery's zionism, are part of the problem. Zionism is not going to produce the solutions and answers to Zionism - they are just going to perpetuate zionism by iterating a superifically prettier version of this ugly ideology: Something like "ethnic cleansing Lite."

• Blankfort's response to Avnery on boycott issue
  • anomalous August 30, 2009 at 3:49 pm

    As someone who's spent many years out in the streets protesting and online writing, and taking all the unpleasantness and heat that comes with that, I've watched Jews by the thousands playing the same game. They'll insist they are leftists, deeply committed to human rights, etc. And yet rather than take a stand, they'll stand on the sidelines waiting and watching. I can say 200,000,000 words that they believed in, but that's irrelevant, because what they are waiting for is the one word that they cannot tolerate, whatever that might be - they're watching for the trivial ideological discrepancy that for whatever profound moral reason prevents them from standing up in support. They can't take a stand, because they don't like this word or that phrase. They can't support or defend people who are criticizing Israel because there is always some bullshit they have to hone in on and get irate about - how dare you use the phrase "ethnic cleansing" to describe what happened to Paletsinians in 1948! How dare you use the word "genocidal" to characterize Israel's sanctions on Gaza! How dare you say that zionism is racism! How dare you blah blah blah. It's all crap, this nit-picking and stone-walling and hemming and hawing. They know it's wrong, they know there is a hole in their hearts where compassion for someone who is non-Jewish should be, but instead of doing what everyone on earth can see is right, they choose to quibble and argue and write a hundred thousand outraged letters to the editor over the hair-thin differences they have with whoever it is they have decided to denounce for their lack of whatever.

    This is all just Jewish exceptionalism: dirty, old-fashioned racism, and nothing more.

• Herzl's contempt for Armenians was an original sin of Zionism
  • anomalous August 14, 2009 at 1:58 pm with 1 replies

    Donald, above, writes: "The irony is that Herzl’s description of this Armenian couple sounds, well , anti-semitic. "

    Herzl and the foundational zionists were absolutely anti-semitic in any meaningful sense of the word. The entire project of zionism was concieved by a bunch of incidentally Jewish European guys who had concluded that Jewish diaspora culture as a whole, with all it incredible diversity and cultural wealth, was worthless, dirty, backwards, and "abnormal." They didn't think of anti-semitism as an eruption of violent, irrational impulses, or as expressions of misguided class resentments. They thought of anti-semitism as a perfectly appropriate, natural, reasonable response of normal people to the presence of such obviously inferior people.

    The entire zionist project, far from being a project to protect Jews as it is generally understood in the US, was a project to destroy Jewish culture, to annihilate Jewish communities, to annul non-Hebrew languages and cultures, to erase a thousand years of unique and extraordinarily rich and fruitful cultural symbioses, to sweep it all into a dustbin, so that a new kind of Jew would emerge - one modelled after the European enlightnement, and using assimilated European Jewish men as the template to which all the Jews of the world must conform.

    Within Israel, Zionism's war against Jewish culture continues to play out against Mizrahim - the vast array of cultures and peoples called "arab Jews" - the people Ben-Gurion famously despised as "human dust," and who were promptly deployed to the margins of the zionist state, where they could act as a human buffer zone to absorb the violence and frustration of the millions of neighbors that Zionism had wronged.

  • anomalous August 14, 2009 at 1:04 pm

    Phil, you write that "indifference to an indigenous Asian minority is in the DNA of Zionism," and you characterize that as "an original sin of Zionism."

    This seems strange to me, because quite clearly the indifference of zionism extended then, as it extends today, to every non-Jew on earth. Zionism's relations with non-Jews have always been very purely instrumental, and not moral at all. As such it is zionism itself that is the sin, and not merely some particular detail of its self-serving tribal machinations.

    The Yishuv was not oblivious to the mass murder campaigns orchestrated against Armenians, nor were the Zionists. Herzl's seminal "Der Judenstaat" - the foundational manifesto of zionism - was published only three months after the Hamidian Massacres, which saw several hundred thousand Armenians massacred in Anatolia.

    Herzl said nothing, and quite understandably so, since at the time he was still currying favor with the Turks, and banking heavily on a deal whereby the Sultan would grant the zionists control of Palestine in exchange for the assumption of Turkish debts by the World Zionist Organization. He seemed more than content to allow his fellows (Jews, Armenians and Greeks enjoyed close relations under the Ottoman millet system) to be slaughtered en masse, and in silence, if his silence would further the zionist scheme. There was virtually no Jewish protest on behalf of the Armenians during the several episodes of mass murder leading up to the final genocide, and even during the genocide, significant numbers of Jews from Palestine fought in the Turkish army and presumably assisted in the killing. It seems to have been forgotten that the Zionist leadership at the time, along with most of the Yishuv, were firmly pro-German and pro-Turkish.

    The only noteworthy exception to the shameful silence of the Yishuv was the Nilli Group, a small familiar network of Jewish spies in Palestine who from 1915 to 1917 - motivated by the murder of Armenians - betrayed the Yishuv's formal alliance with the Turks and Germans to provide intelligence to the British. (Interestingly, as late as 1991 their work remains controversial; segments about the Armenian genocide were censored by the Israeli government from a documentary about the Nilli Group).

    After the genocide, a few dissenters who had placed themselves on the margins of the zionist movement began to speak out about what had happened to the Armenians, including Israel Zangwill. In general, however, the fate of the Armenians was only cynically deployed by zionists as an unfortunate case history demonstrating the untrustworthiness and violent nature of the goyim. Arch-racist Jabotinsky's 1936 "Evacuation Plan" - in reality an "invasion plan", whereby the entire and sizable Jewish populations of a number of Eastern European countries would be forcibly relocated to Palestine - was promoted using the fate of the Armenians as an example of what would befall Jews who rejected zionism.

    After the establishment of Israel, successive Israeli governments went to enormous lengths not only to deny the Armenian genocide, but to work in collusion with Turkey to undermine international efforts to memorialize the historic crime. Generations of zionist scholars have gone to extraordinary lengths to "explain" why the Holocaust is unique and cannot be compared to other historical genocides, and as such have been deployed for decades to cast doubt on the historicity, extent, and significance of the Armenian genocide. Zionist scholars continue to dominate and stifle discussion of the Armenian genocide within the field of genocide studies, and Israel has played a creepy role in hosting genocide themed conferences at which Armenian scholars are systematically marginalized.

    To this date, Israel continues to desecrate the memory of the Armenian genocide by tossing it about like a political football whenever they get their racist panties in a bunch. For a particularly nauseating but highly instructive example, check the January 2009 article in Huffpo called "Israel May Retaliate Against Turkey by Recognizing the Armenian Genocide."

    "Enraged by the abrasive tone of Turkey's condemnation of Israel's attack on Gaza, Israeli officials and Turkish analysts are now raising the possibility that Tel Aviv may retaliate either by recognizing the Armenian Genocide or refusing to help Turkey to lobby against a congressional resolution on the genocide. In a January 5 editorial, the Jerusalem Post escalated the level of Israeli displeasure by questioning Turkey's credibility on passing judgment on other countries: "On balance, we're not convinced that Turkey has earned the right to lecture Israelis about human rights." Finally, Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister, Majalli Whbee angrily lashed back at the Prime Minister of Turkey. Several Turkish media outlets quoted Whbee as stating: "Erdogan says that genocide is taking place in Gaza. We [Israel] will then recognize the Armenian related events as genocide." Whbee, a member of the Israeli Knesset and a close confidante of Prime Minister Olmert, issued the following warning to Turkey: "We, as Israel, hope that Prime Minister Erdogan's statements will not damage our relations. But, if Turkey does not behave fairly, this will have its consequences." While it is unlikely that Israel would reverse its long-standing refusal to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide, it may decide not to accommodate future Turkish requests to have American Jewish organizations to lobby against a congressional resolution on the Armenian Genocide."

    Pure disgustingness. Zionism in a nutshell.

    For more on the grotesque history of Zionism's silent complicity, check out Yair Auron's 1990 book "The Banality of Indifference: Zionism and the Armenian Genocide."

• Coming Face To Face With Israeli Racism
  • anomalous August 3, 2009 at 8:03 pm

    Yep, all in Manhattan.

  • anomalous August 3, 2009 at 12:49 pm with 3 replies

    I tried the same experiment in Manhattan many years ago. I was very nervous, and on my very first outing in a Free Palestine tshirt, a huge man stopped me in a store, and began shaking and crying. I seriously thought he was going to kill me and began preparing myself to drop my groceries and run for the exit. Instead he told me he is Palestinian and that in all his time in the US he had never once seen even a single person express their support for Palestine, and he wanted to tell me how much it meant to him, to shake my hand and personally thank me. I was very moved, and stocked up on Free Palestine tshirts, with a large Palestine flag, which I wore frequently for about a decade.

    Over the years I experienced many incidents as a result, most of them very positive and supportive, but I was also physically attacked on several occasions. In my first week or so wearing my shirt, I had one person - a candidate for city council at the time, I later discovered - stop me in the street and tell me that when he found out where I live he would kill me. That was the first of many times that I was threatened like that, and it made quite an impression on me. I had my door painted with swastikas. I was spit on several dozen times, and other times kicked, tripped, shoved and slapped by strangers in the street. A popular kind of assault consisted of walking into me so violently, shoulder-first, that I would be thrown backwards to the ground, while the attacker would simply keep walking on as if nothing had happened. I had ribs broken two or three times, and a toe broken on another by someone who walked up to my face and slammed their foot down abruptly on the top of my foot. I was kicked from behind and knocked to the ground once by a group of kids who ran off, calling me "terrorist!" I once had a person get out of a passing car, grab a bag of garbage out of a dumpster and hurl it at me.

    The vast majority of negative incidents were simply verbal attacks. I was called "nazi" at least several hundred times. Old Jewish ladies called me "Adolf." I was stopped in the street many, many times by furious Jews who wanted to bombard me with various questions and declarations. I had one guy who told me to take my shirt off immediately and said that it was illegal to wear that flag; he wouldn't let me pass him on the sidewalk and insisted that I was going to take the shirt off right now if I knew what was good for me. I had an MTA bus driver stop in mid street, open his door, and scream "fuck you" at me. Innumerable people made quiet comments about me being a "terrorist" or "anti-semite" to their friends as I passed. I had a group of Moishe's Movers guys - all Israelis, judging from their heavy accents - chase me out of a park while I was walking my dog; one of them said that although he doesn't feel bad about what my face is going to look like when he's done with me, he does feel bad for what he's going to do to my little dog. I was kicked out of a few shops and restaurants on the grounds that my shirt was disrespectful or offensive to customers. One shop owner called the police on me. The police on the subway were so bad - particularly after the London bombing - that I eventually took to turning my shirt inside out before entering the subway. Palestinians would sometimes stop me to warn me that living in this country I probably didn't understand how dangerous it is to wear such a message. Israelis live HERE, they cautioned.

    I finally understood very clearly when, after an attack by a group of 3 Israelis at a small demonstration, I had had to get my first Palestine-related medical treatment: aggressive antibiotic treatment for human bites. One of them actually jumped on my back and bit me. While one tried to crush my windpipe and claw at my eye sockets another kicked me repeatedly in the groin and ruptured some blood vessels in my inner thigh, and my entire upper leg turned black over the course of a few days. One of the attackers ripped the eyeglasses off the faces of several people at the demonstration, including my own, ripped them to pieces and threw them into traffic.

    After the swelling went away it turned out that they had left a much more serious injury: multiple fractures in the head of one of my femurs, at the point where it connects with the pelvis - an injury which eventually became so painful that I was completely unable to walk for a few months. 5 years later it still hurts and I haven't been able to run ever since.

    I mention all of this because I thought that perhaps readers might get the mistaken impression that these displays of Jewish racism might be something confined to Israel. It absolutely is not.

    I recently stumbled across a series of 12 videos on youtube - grotesquely entitled "This is why people hate the Jews" - which show a group of haredim apparently harrassing the owners of a Christian shop in Israel. What struck me most was that it all seemed absolutely, disturbingly FAMILIAR. Having attended many hundreds of Palestine solidarity demonstrations around the NYC area, I feel I have seen this exact scene play out - down to the smallest detail - dozens of times. I don't know any of the back story, but if you can get past the appalling anti-semitic titles, it's fascinating viewing:
    link to youtube.com

• I thought Sacha Baron Cohen was brave, turns out he's just a neocon weenie
  • anomalous August 1, 2009 at 1:42 am

    If the substance of Borat's "joke" was that far too many otherwise sane Jews squeal excessively about a supposedly omnipresent, virulent anti-semitism which, it turns out, doesn't exist, then it would be funny. Instead, the joke is the tired old racist aria called "everyone hates the Jews." It's just not funny. It's not defusing racism, or illuminating racism. It's ultimately just a popularization and reiteration of a deep-rooted tradition of intense anti-gentile racism within classical Judaism. It's also a crucial component in the ideological machinery of zionism which encourages normal people to become militant tribal warriors.

• definitely not good for the Jews
  • anomalous August 1, 2009 at 2:24 am

    What a horrific business. Similar stories of international trade in organs surface every few years and then are quickly buried and forgotten, perhaps in part because Israelis seem to always be involved.

    Some of the stories are so ghoulish that you'ld think they couldn't even be real - such as this one - link to haaretz.com
    
    where a pair of Israeli doctors made a practice of recruiting retarded Palestinians for organ sales, only to renege on payments after the organs were removed. The going rate? $7,000 to the person donating the kidney, and $135,000 to the Israeli doctor extracting and selling it.

    There are so very many of these stories... I spent about an hour compiling a list of links to various sources, most of them Israeli press acounts, but others from places like UNESCO, which in toto paint a fairly unambiguious picture of Israel as a central hub in the world's organ traffic trade. Unfortunately your site's ridiculous "spam filter" would not allow me to post any of them. I'll try it without the list of links, but I'm very disappointed by this nonsense.

• We're moving (by fits and starts) toward a new 'Comments' policy
  • anomalous August 1, 2009 at 2:26 am

    The new look is great, by the way - clean, easy on the eye, inviting.

• Settlements have turned us into 'the loathsome scum among nations,' prophetic Peace Now poster cries
  • anomalous August 1, 2009 at 2:45 am

    Look, it is not settlements that have turned Israel into "loathsome scum." It is zionism itself that turned Israeli into loathsome scum. And this transformation did not happen in 1968. Israel was loathscum scum since before the state was even ripped out of Palestine through a vast and murderous campaign of ethnic cleansing in the late 1940s. Israel was loathsome scum when it was just a bunch of jewish supremacist militants, dreaming of genocide and setting up fortresses in a country full of "negroes," setting up Jewish-only businesses and Jewish-only farms, evicting non-Jews and taxing Palestinians for the construction of exclusively Jewish business ventures.

    Zionism is the root of this problem. It was a bad idea 100 years ago and it remains an even worse idea today.

    Peace Now has its place and should absolutely be commended, but not lets forget that Peace Now is also a zionist movement, committed to maintaining Jewish supremacy, and among other things, very strictly opposed to the idea that Israeli should abide by international law as far as the rights of refugees are concerned.

    We can dismantle every settlement, but as long as this militant Jewish supremacist movement continues to be percieved by Jews as a legitimate, morally defensible ideology, there will not be any resolution to this crisis.
    Ilan Pappe's article in Znet this week, "Disarming Israel", is spot-on:
    link to zmag.org

    "The project of disarming Israel is thus presented here as an ideological disarming. It begins with asking people concerned with the realities in Palestine and Israel, for whatever reason, to learn the history of the Zionist project, to understand its raison d'etre and its long term impact on the indigenous people of Palestine. Hopefully, such knowledge about the history would associate the violence raging in that land with the historical roots and the ideological background of Zionism as it developed through the years.

    Recognition of the role of the ideology that necessitated the building of a fortress with one of the most formidable armies in the world, and one of the most flourishing arms industry, enables activists to tackle tangible goals in the struggle for peace and reconciliation in Israel and Palestine, and in the general struggle for disarmament in the world.

    An efficient process of ideological disarming should avoid unnecessary demonization, should clearly distinguish between political systems and ‘people' as such, should clearly perceive how reality is distorted, information manipulated, how educational systems and other socialization organs can indoctrinate and governments misrepresent and demonize whom they wish.

    This is in essence a strategy of activism that would initiate a very tough dialogue with a state and a society that wish to be part of the ‘civilized' world, while remaining racist and supremacist. In it lives a society that does not wish, or is unable, to see that its ideological nature and its policies locate it within the group of rouge states of this world. For better or for worse, what academics in the West teach about Israel, what journalists report about it, what conscious and conscientious people think about it and what eventually politicians would decide to do about it, is the key to change in the reality in Israel and Palestine. This dismal reality has repercussion not only to peace in the Middle East but in the world as a whole. But it is not a lost case, and now is the time to act. "

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