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Total number of comments: 4508 (since 2009-07-31 03:28:07)

Donald

Donald Johnson is a regular commenter on this site, as "Donald."

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  • A portrait of a former Zionist (Part 1)
    • Donald May 12, 2012 at 9:26 am

      "Donald i understand where you com from and the appeal of such comparisons
      But our case with the Palestinians is quite unique as you well know."

      Nah, I don't know that. Every conflict has its unique features, but the I/P conflict sounds much like portions of American history, particularly the treatment of Native Americans, though there are also comparisons one can make with the treatment of African-Americans. One doesn't have to romanticize the victims in making such comparisons--in fact, the comparisons are that much closer when you look at how Native American atrocities were used to justify what whites did to them. And I already mentioned how white racists used to bring up various examples of black violence when the issue of white racism was raised. It's not hard to understand--it's just how people react to criticism that makes them uncomfortable.

    • Donald May 11, 2012 at 9:03 am

      Oleg, I agree that comparisons to the Warsaw Ghetto are over the top--I got into an argument about that here years ago. Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is more aptly compared to Western racism in general--at its very worst Western racists engaged in mass murder and genocide, but much of the time it was more day-to-day humiliation, oppression, legal double standards, etc... I think I understand Israeli treatment of Palestinians without ever having visited because it sounds so much like American racism.

      Anyway, you are zeroing in on that Gaza/Warsaw comparison because there you have a point--you're ignoring what Sumud points out in the May 10 2:11 A.M. post. As for your other point, the romanticization of Palestinians, the violence in Damascus, and so forth, can you not see that you're the wrong person to be making it unless you first admit the brutality and thuggishness and racism of your own side? Instead you act like someone who gets angry whenever that is brought up, so you try to change the subject. Your reaction is like the white racists I used to know growing up who'd talk about black-on-black violence in the ghetto or Idi Amin or something of that sort whenever the issue of white racism was raised.

  • Beinart's romance, and the coming tragedy
    • Donald April 30, 2012 at 10:09 pm

      "The history of the Jews, particularly in Europe, in the thousand or so years before 1948, is one punctuated by expulsion after expulsion, periodic massacres, and after the Enlightenment and Emancipation, the worst massacre of all."

      There were a lot of massacres in Europe, actually, aimed at a lot of different groups. The concept of universal human rights really didn't take a firm hold until after 1945 (and only in some places after that). When that concept doesn't have a firm grip on people's minds, you have things like the Balkans Wars and Europeans who go to other places end up replicating the same sort of behavior they complained about in Europe (for example, the Nakba).

      "That is why, no matter how successful Jews are in America, no matter how much wealth individual Jews may accumulate, no matter how esteemed Jews are, it is not security, and the equal rights rhetoric of the one-staters is unconvincing."

      That's a weird segue. Are you talking about Israel or America? If you do want to fantasize about how it could happen here and why Jews need a refuge, what's to become of the rest of us? Or are you assuming that in an America gone mad most of the rest of us are the bad guys? What state do Amnesty International supporters flee to? Oh, wait, I know--people like me are going to be launching pogroms, because that's just the way we are. You can take the goy out of the Middle Ages, but you can't take the Middle Ages out of the goy.

      "But the status of Jews across the world has improved more the last 64 years than in the 1000 years before that. I don’t think that is a coincidence."

      Magical thinking. There's been a gradual awakening regarding the rights of minorities in the past century or so, particularly after WWII, though in the US it didn't really take off until the 60's and the idea has been gradually expanding to include other groups, such as gay people. The existence of Israel has precisely nothing to do with the fact that Jews are no longer discriminated against in the US. And what is supposed to be the cause and effect relationship between Israel and improved rights for Jews in the rest of the world?

  • Shmully and guilt
    • Donald April 26, 2012 at 5:19 pm

      "Chabad thinks in terms of (imagined) timeless metaphysical categories. Jacob is the People of Israel. Esau is the eternal anti-Semite: in Talmudic times Esau was Rome; in the Middle Ages Esau was the Catholic Church; today he is the Muslims. Anti-Semitism itself is a unique metaphysical phenomenon and not subject to normal historical cause and effect i.e. rational analysis, which is why ending the occupation would do nothing to end the Jewish Palestinian conflict in Israel/Palestine – their opinion."

      I don't know anything about Chabad, but I agree that this way of thinking, whoever holds it, is seriously screwed up. (I've seen it before--it's almost the default set of assumptions behind many defenses of Israel.) It's no different from, say, the belief that white people are the "ice people" eternally destined to hate and persecute blacks. This is where anti-racism turns into a new form of racism. It's one thing to acknowledge and fight against anti-semitism and it's something else to elevate it into, as you say, some metaphysical truth about the world, something that should always be expected from non-Jews.

      Jews were persecuted during ancient, medieval and modern times because for most of human history that's how powerful majority groups interacted with powerless or nearly powerless minority groups. Ask the Cathars, if you can find one. The solution to this eternal problem of hateful bigotry against the minority groups of any given society is to work for a world where all human beings are seen as having equal rights.

      This has been another episode of "state the fracking obvious." Back to lurking.

  • Palestinian and Palestine-solidarity activists issue critique and condemnation of Gilad Atzmon
    • Donald March 16, 2012 at 7:03 pm

      "That doesn’t mean that opinions about historical facts can be penalized or that everyone has to abandon studies or discussions on comparative religion. Articles 19 and 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights doesn’t permit the prohibition of an individual’s right to hold an opinion on the grounds that it is erroneous or an incorrect interpretation of past events. link to www2.ohchr.org"

      I'm not really talking about legal standing. I shouldn't use legal terms around a lawyer, I guess. I meant moral standing. People who are (rightly) sensitive about Islamophobia should show the same concern about anti-semitism.

      To the various questions about Mearsheimer--

      I don't know why he defended Atzmon. I happened to become aware of Atzmon's anti-semitic ravings at the same time I became aware of Atzmon. I've also seen him when he's on his best behavior and sure, anyone can say some pretty devastating things about Zionism and the bigots who support Israel no matter what it does. Mearsheimer might have seen that. If, however, he saw some of the comments listed in this article and still defended Atzmon, then he's wrong.

      Anyway, hiding behind Mearsheimer's august authority seems like another evasion to me. Plenty of otherwise intelligent people have defended Israel too. So what? Atzmon says disgusting things alongside those things that most anti-Zionists might agree with, including me, and the reasonable statements do not cancel out or explain the noxious ones. And besides, my list of reasons was actually meant for people here who defend Atzmon. You're the one who decided to cite Mearsheimer as some sort of shield. As for pettiness, I'm petty sometimes and have on occasion noticed I'm not the only one. Being too proud to admit one is wrong, or being stupidly partisan on some issue--been there, done that, and for damn sure seen it in others. When it comes to political arguments, one sort of expects the worst to come out much of the time.

      One thing that struck me about Atzmon--for me, the key to understanding the I/P conflict was my own upbringing in the immediate post Jim Crow south. I had a nine year old best friend who was glad Martin Luther King was killed. He was the norm. I heard all sorts of white rationalizations for the treatment given black people, all sorts of defensiveness about Southern history. So when reading about Israel, it all sounded familiar. Then I read Atzmon and for him, the comparison of Israeli colonialism to other forms is somehow bad, because it understates the real evil of it. That's anti-semitic, pure and simple. It's also stupid. Israel is a country with a crappy human rights record based on an ideology that (to them) justifies their crimes. Well, join the club. That doesn't excuse them, but if we in the US weren't intimately involved in their crimes and weren't constantly being told of their glorious democratic values I'd lump them in with all the other crappy countries with crappy human rights records (including ours). Atzmon in his dumbest comments sounds like he has some delusional megalomaniac sense that he comes from some specially evil people.

      This stuff matters because anti-Zionism is supposed to be a subset of anti-racism, and if people really want to see a one state solution with both Palestinians and Jews living together in peace there shouldn't be a whiff of either anti-Arab racism or anti-semitism. I don't think it's very healthy that people could read some of those comments by Atzmon and say nothing more than oh, well, sometimes he's provocative or pretend that there's no problem. The claim that there is no problem is a problem.

      As for this blog, I'd be curious to see what people would say if they were assured of complete anonymity and all rules on what could be said were lifted. Several years back the comment section had quite a few open Holocaust deniers and also open anti-Arab racists, one of whom I still see posting at other blogs using his real name--he'd probably come back given the chance. And we had a David Irving fan here until about a year ago, someone who openly called himself an anti-semite. He fit right in. Well, lift the rules--I want to see who is comfortable with whom. Or I would, except I'm getting sick of this place again. I expect Israel apologists to be insensitive jerks with racist attitudes. Well, truth be told why should one expect any better from the anti-Israel side? We're all sweetness and light, free of all forms of hatred? Yeah, sure we are.

    • Donald March 14, 2012 at 8:07 pm

      "I think all discourse is acceptable discourse, Donald. I say the more rope you give some people,the better."

      Fine. I agree. If some anti-Zionists really are anti-semites, then let's have it out in the open.

      "You may beg to differ. Apparently, you do. "

      I used to disagree, about a month ago in fact. I've changed my mind. See above. I think that if some of the commentariat at Mondoweiss admires Atzmon and wants to defend him, then let them have all the rope they want. The Palestinians don't need us. God help them if they do.

      As for Mearsheimer and others who defend Atzmon, I've already outlined various reasons why someone might do that which don't require anti-semitism, but here they are again, with one added.

      1. Ignorance of some of what he's said, perhaps followed by an unwillingness to admit one has been wrong.
      2. Resentment over all the false charges of anti-semitism, which leads people to refuse to see the real thing when it's in front of them.
      3. Simple stupid political partisanship. Our side good, their side bad. If someone is an anti-Zionist, he must be a good guy. Though this is similar to 2, I guess. People get so angry it's like pulling teeth to get them to admit that anything said by someone against a self-proclaimed anti-Zionist could be true.
      4. Anti-semitism.

      Or it could be mixtures of various things.

      By the way, your Saddam Hussein quote was also pretty pathetic. It's like you want to defend something defensible rather than what Atzmon actually says. Of course it was stupid for Arafat to side with Saddam in 1991. Duh. That's not Islamophobia or a racist comment against Palestinians. Compare that with a claim that so long as they identify as Palestinians they will inevitably side with savage dictators, because that's the essence of what Palestinian nationalism is all about. Now see that? That was a fair analogy to what Atzmon says. Possibly it isn't nasty enough, but it's closer to the real thing than yours.

      Excuse me, though. The Rush Limbaugh school of acceptable discourse on feminazism is hosting a lecture on women's rights and I don't want to miss it.

    • Donald March 14, 2012 at 4:28 pm

      Oh, let me add something. That defense of Atzmon's remark that you copied was pathetic. In no way does it justify what he said. Now maybe Atzmon is too stupid to be able to write what he means, and so sometimes when he only means to criticize a particular tactic he accidentally sounds like he is comparing European anti-semitism in the 1930's with criticism of Israel today. Maybe he only accidentally sounded like a Jew-hater. Gosh, that was careless, wasn't it?

    • Donald March 14, 2012 at 4:23 pm

      "Donald, I must say I am uncomortable with your self-appointed role as to what is acceptable discourse and what is not."

      I must say I feel uncomfortable with your self-appointed role as to what is acceptable discourse about what is acceptable discourse. People make moral judgments about other people's comments here all the time and I'm making mine. If someone thinks Atzmon's comments are acceptable, then that person has no standing to condemn Islamophobia. That person is just choosing which forms of bigotry he will condemn and which he will let slide. It's a double standard.

      Are double standards "acceptable discourse"? In practice they sure seem to be.

    • Page: 45
    • Donald March 14, 2012 at 3:24 pm

      "But when it comes to substance, well, I don’t see it."

      Look, I think that's a choice you're making, not to see it. He's "in your face" in exactly the same way that Islamophobes are "provocative" and "in your face". Hardly anyone here on the anti-Zionist side would have any trouble seeing what is wrong with what Atzmon says if one just altered it a little bit and made it about Muslims.

    • Donald March 14, 2012 at 2:05 pm with 24 replies

      "I can’t get my head around this. Can someone help? -"

      I don't know. Did you look at the Atzmon quotes cited above? Are you comfortable with them?

      Here's what I can't understand--why people who react so strongly to Islamophobes have such difficulty seeing what is wrong with Atzmon. He's not just criticizing Zionism, just like Islamophobes don't just criticize violent Islamic extremists.

      Okay, I think I can understand it. In the most benign case, people are so irritated by false charges of antisemitism that when the real thing comes along they can't see it. Or they just divide everything into two categories based on how they feel about Zionism, never mind that some people hate Zionism for reasons that aren't so terribly nice when you look at them. If you identify yourself as an anti-Zionist and don't ever consider the possibility that others might be anti-Zionists for reasons that have more to do with hatred than anything else, you might find yourself allied with neo-Nazis. Or that's two possibilities. There are others which get even more unpleasant to contemplate.

      "Yet Weiss sees the solution to zionism as one that is necessarily jewish in nature. Sure, Wiess says that non-Jews must be brought in to the mix, but there remains an exculsivist element to his prescriptions. Fair characterization?"

      What does that have to do with Atzmon?

      "The remarkable fact is they don't understand why the world is beginning to stand against them in the same way they didn't understand why the Europeans stood against them in the 1930s. Instead of asking why we are hated they continue to toss accusations on others"

      See the teensy little issue here? Phil correctly sees that Zionism is in large part a Jewish problem, but somehow manages to avoid linking the outrage people feel towards Israel with the "outrage" that Europeans in the 1930's felt towards Jews. This is no great credit to Phil--anyone of even average intelligence and ordinary decency would know better than to make that kind of linkage.

      Here's another of Atzmon's brilliant insights and when I say "brilliant", what I mean is "unbelievably mindnumbingly stupid".

      "Machover’s reading of Zionism is pretty trivial. “Israel,” he says, is a “settler state.” For Machover this is a necessary point of departure because it sets Zionism as a colonialist expansionist project. The reasoning behind such a lame intellectual spin is obvious. As long as Zionism is conveyed as a colonial project, Jews, as a people, should be seen as ordinary people. They are no different from the French and the English, they just happen to run their deadly colonial project in a different time."

      So according to the great jazz musician, when you compare Israeli policies to the the extremely brutal colonial rule of, say, the French, you're portraying Jews as "ordinary people" rather than as, well, what exactly? Well, as "Jews",which for Atzmon means something worse than the French who ran their colonies in equatorial Africa. (Which were, according to Adam Hochschild in "King Leopold's Ghost", as brutal as Leopold's Congo Free State in which a large fraction of the population died.)

      If I were in charge of pro-Israel propaganda I'd be on constant lookout for a self-proclaimed anti-Zionist who linked his anti-Zionism with traditional anti-semitic beliefs. Boy, that would be convenient. Of course this propaganda gift would work better if there are people in the anti-zionist movement stupid enough to fall for it. We're lucky nothing like that could ever happen.

    • Donald March 14, 2012 at 12:21 pm with 3 replies

      I agree with this, but expect you may hear from some who don't.

      This came up several days ago at JSF--

      link

      If you scroll down you'll find a particularly good comment by "evildoer" in response to someone named
      "Maju"--I'd link directly to the comment, but when I tried to do so a few minutes ago my computer acted funny. I'm not sure what happened, so if interested you'll just have to do a bit of scrolling.

  • Obama could only take Netanyahu on when Dennis Ross, Bibi's backchannel, was incommunicado
    • Donald March 14, 2012 at 10:58 am with 2 replies

      In reference to Obama's liberal Zionist background, here's a paragraph from his first speech reacting to the Reverend Wright controversy (this is before he cut ties with Wright)-- March 18 2008

      "But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren't simply controversial. They weren't simply a religious leader's effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country - a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam."

      Hardly anyone was talking about Wright's views of Israel in March 2008, but in defending American exceptionalism (whatever one thinks about that) Obama felt it necessary to make a point about Israel and the Mideast that any neocon would have applauded. There's a wide spectrum of people calling themselves "liberal Zionists"--Jerry Slater is on the left (he may be on bad terms with various people here, but he's a very harsh critic of Israeli violence) and on the right you've got alleged supporters of a 2SS that never blame Israel for anything. Obama is somewhere in the middle. In this speech he was way over on the right.

  • Remnick ignores the Nakba's role in Israeli 'democracy'
    • Donald March 14, 2012 at 10:08 am

      "They would never support this kind of return, because they’re delighted that Jews were expelled and fled to Palestine/Israel. So if they think about Jews this way, what do you expect of them to think about expelled Nonjews?"

      I expect ethnic cleansers to be racists who will create racist societies. As the Arab world moves towards democracy one of the things it will (one hopes) face up to is the ugly treatment of minorities, including Jews. The same applies to Israel, though their example of a democracy facing up to its own past is not encouraging.

  • @IDFSpokesperson tweets inaccurate video and fake civilian casualty statistics
    • Donald March 14, 2012 at 11:31 am

      "If some country feels that they want to blockade us then they are welcome
      to try but obviously this also has consequences."

      So you are abandoning the moral claim and falling back on whose is bigger?
      I've noticed it often goes this way.

    • Donald March 14, 2012 at 10:38 am

      "I can’t answer a hypothetical question such as this i don’t have your prophetic
      skill , but."

      You then proceeded to answer your own hypothetical question. Anyway, mine was easy. If it is okay to blockade Gaza for the threat posed by rockets (and I don't think that's the only reason for the blockade--it was also to discredit Hamas by making Gazans suffer), then it would be okay to blockade Israel for the much greater violence and oppression they inflict on Palestinians. That's true, isn't it? But if you don't agree, and I'm sure you don't, then you'd probably support acts of violence far greater than anything the Gazans can inflict in order to lift that blockade. If somehow the Gazans imposed it, you guys would bombard Gaza.

      What's hypothetical about my question is that we live in a world where lordly Westerners congratulate themselves for being civilized as they decide exactly how much violence and oppression they will inflict on the barbarians who elected the wrong people. There's no way that Israel or the US will be placed under severe sanctions or blockades and we won't have F-16's or drones flying in assassinating the people who allegedly committed war crimes against others. And we won't hold our own people accountable, but through all this we will talk in hypothetical meaningless terms about how our system of government means that we are accountable for its actions.

    • Donald March 14, 2012 at 9:59 am

      "I’m a big fan of truth…and justice and morality and all that good stuff. :-)"

      It is a good thing to admit it when some hasbarist happens to say something that is actually true. But as you know, don't expect them to follow your example--if they did, their whole position would start to crumble.

    • Donald March 14, 2012 at 9:56 am

      "Aren’t you guys always argue that Hamas legitimately won the elections
      in PA and that they are the genuine democratic article chosen
      by the Palestinian people as their leaders.

      You can’t have the rope both ways on this one.
      If you are correct and BTW (i tend to agree they won the elections fair and square) then the people that voted them into power share some responsibility
      for their elected government actions just as we Israeli citizens share
      it for ours."

      From all that you've said above that last concession ("we Israeli citizens share it for ours") is meaningless. You recite as an article of faith the belief in the good intentions of your government and if Israel were subjected to a Gaza-style blockade as severe as what Israel and Mubarak's Egypt did to Gaza, you and your government would undoubtedly see it as an atrocity and an act of war and I don't doubt the word "terrorism" would come into it.

      "Before we continue.
      Do you support the targeting of civilians with rockets or suicide bombings against civilians?"

      Westerners (not just Israelis) have this trick of pretending that they don't support the targeting of civilians and then supporting policies which essentially do target civilians.

      Not that you asked me, but I don't support Palestinian attacks on civilians, but then I don't support Israeli attacks on civilians either. Getting you to that level of moral consistency is probably a hopeless undertaking, largely because you will find some way to rationalize Israeli actions as legitimate and well-intentioned.

  • Exclusive Excerpt: Miko Peled's 'The General's Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine'
    • Donald March 10, 2012 at 4:29 pm

      "How come you have nothing to say about what Islamic leaders say Jews and wiping Israel off the map? Why don’t you show us where you have opened up your mouth on this one?"

      It's not clear who the raving Islamophobe is talking to, but how is the bigotry of some Muslims supposed to justify his own bigotry?

    • Donald March 10, 2012 at 10:16 am

      "What is common humanity anyway. The pseudo liberals interpret this as everyone is the same and should be treated equally. And what makes me want to pull my hear out is that these same liberals are pushing Palestinian/Islamic themes where common humanity is nowhere to be found. If you don’t believe in Allah then you are an infidel, a monkey, a pig. What about the treatment of woman and gays?
      The key to progress towards the peace tombishop is referring to will only come once Islam undergoes a period of enlightenment and comes out the other side a lot more tolerant of others."

      Change a few words and this would be a clear-cut case of raving anti-semitism. It's not factual criticism of Islamic extremism, but a sweeping statement about "Islam" and a denial of "common humanity".

  • MSM jailbreak: Chris Hayes devotes 2 hours to conflict with panel of 2 Zionists and 2 Palestinians
    • Donald March 12, 2012 at 4:18 pm

      "i think we may have a first class hasbara fruitcake on our site. hopefully it is a temporary affliction."

      Well, I'm not calling for his banning, and anyway, if it isn't him it will be someone else and if I don't reply someone else will. In other words, this is permanent. That particular issue (why were Palestinians hostile before the settlements) is a standard hasbara point and there's a number of others and we've probably seen them all by now, many many times. How should people respond? I've half-seriously suggested that there be some numbering system for the hasbara arguments (building off the JSF post) and some numbering system for the responses, so we could shorten the threads up. A hasbarist types in some argument, the moderator looks at it, sighs,deletes the comment, replaces it with "Hasbara argument 14", which links to a definitive statement of the argument, probably better written. Then while he or she is at it, they can then provide the link to "Hasbara argument refutation 14". Problem solved, rehash of old arguments nipped in bud.

      Maybe it could even be automated. I bet some clever programmer could write something that would recognize a hasbara argument from certain key words. In this case "Palestinians" "declared war on Israel" "no settlements" "1967" might do the trick. Or why wait for human input (assuming that's what we have now) to start the process off? Just have a random number generator type in random Hasbara numbers and every day we could just see the debates appear automatically.

    • Donald March 12, 2012 at 3:32 pm

      "You might want to ask your Palestinian and Arab friends why they declared war on Israel in 1967, WHEN THERE WERE NO SETTLEMENTS !"

      Look, this is nursery school level debate. I could reply on a slightly higher level (the Arabs declared war because Israel was bombing them) or we could just cut the garbage. Palestinians were hostile to Israel before 1967 because the creation of Israel included the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, including killings of thousands of civilians many after the war, in the late 40's and early 50's according to Benny Morris's "Israel's Border Wars".

      What is the comment section for, btw? I've been wondering that for the past month or so. RW was banned because of all the threadjacking and endless arguments (which I participated in) over denial of simple facts, but nothing has changed. Here we've got someone pretending to find it mysterious that Palestinians were hostile to Israel before the 67 settlements--that argument might be popular in certain circles and might even convince people who don't know anything about 48, but it's simply ridiculous. It's like asking why Native Americans were hostile to white settlers before, say, the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890. Well, gosh, I don't know, maybe because there were other bad things that had happened before then? And yes, Palestinians in turn had killed Jewish civilians in the 20's, including children, and the Palestinians in turn were resentful of the fact that an imperial power had promised their land to a minority moving in from outside. And before that, in the 1890's, an early Zionist Ahad Ha'am complained that his fellow Zionists treated Arabs with racist contempt.

    • Donald March 12, 2012 at 9:27 am

      Rubber bullets kill too. You guys screaming for nonviolence on the part o fthe Palestinians take for granted the right of your side to inflict any level of violence your thugs in uniform claim is necessary. Anyway, the standards for nonviolence vary. Everyone talks about the nonviolence of the Egyptian uprising, but in fact there were street battles between the security forces and the protestors. I'm not criticizing the protestors, but it shows that street battles against Egyptian forces are forgotten when there is talk of "nonviolence", but stones thrown against police with body armor is supposed to have us all weepy and upset.

      "I can tell you categorically that in apartheid South Africa there were never separate roads for Blacks and Whites (there are in Saudi Arabia by the way roads only for Muslims). So if there are separate roads in Yehuda and Shomron, then they are there for reasons that have nothing to do with apartheid. They are there because of the deadly violence carried out by the Palestinians on whoever they may find on some roads. "

      A non-sequitur so ridiculous it's hard to believe anyone could have typed it without laughing. Anyway, if the United States not only occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, but started building settlements against the will of the locals and on stolen property, I suspect we'd have to build some "for American only" roads. Not because of apartheid, mind you, but because some of the locals might react violently to the fact that we were stealing their land and setting up two sets of rules and two sets of everything for the locals and the American immigrants. Oh, wait....

    • Donald March 11, 2012 at 11:56 pm

      I have to watch the rest of that online sometime, but the hour or so that I did see was great in just the way you described. Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi got in the usual claim that Israel gave up the Gazan settlements and the Palestinians returned the favor with rocket fire, but in this case, one of the Palestinians (I think Jebreal) later managed to get in the fact that Israel had placed Gaza under siege and shot at fishermen for the crime of going more than 3 miles offshore. If most of the MSM was this fair you could almost shut your blog down. Not quite, of course, but the media criticism aspect would fold up.

      But not to worry--it's hard to imagine the other Chris or Rachel or Ed or Lawrence (not sure about Al) doing anything of this sort.

  • Israel is sucking up all the oxygen in the White House
    • Donald March 12, 2012 at 9:35 am

      That's okay, Leander. I was a little grumpy there. I should have let the first reply stand or rewritten the second one to be less irritable.

    • Donald March 11, 2012 at 11:47 pm

      Incidentally, Leander, where the hell did you get the idea that I believed all the things you attributed to me? I thought it was an interesting post in that I hadn't thought about how this priority given to the alleged Iranian threat probably does have effects on policies (like China trade policy) that are not directly related. From this you conclude that I've embraced the notion that the Lobby is singlehandedly responsible for everything bad in the US and in its foreign policies. Presumably I must also think we committed acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing in the 19th century in order to provide Benny Morris with the rationale he needed to defend the Nakba. That darn Lobby--it can even reach back in space and time and create events that will support the efforts of later hasbarists. Uh, no. Go pick on someone else. I didn't see what you saw in Bruce's post, and even without his clarification that's because it wasn't there in the first place.

    • Donald March 11, 2012 at 11:12 pm

      "That’s true, but somehow I would have expected from you a slightly more critical reaction to the whole list."

      I was focusing mainly on the Iran/China link, which I hadn't thought about before. I don't know if it's true, but it makes sense that if we're trying to get everyone in the world to line up against Iran, there would be tradeoffs.

      I don't blame the Lobby for much besides our policy towards Israel and even there I don't give them all the blame. Overall, though, I think the mentality of US imperialists and Israeli imperialists is such that they probably agree on who to bomb and which thugs to support most of the time anyway, Lobby or no Lobby. The really impressive thing about the Lobby is the way it unifies Congress, turning the entire body (with a handful of exceptions) into groveling sycophants to even a jerk like Netanyahu.

      On Venezuela I think US policy would be bad even if Israel never existed, though it is interesting to see Israeli connections to Latin American death squads pop up from time to time--I first heard about that back in the 80's. My guess is that Israel was supporting mass murderers in Guatemala and other places as a favor to some segments in the US government. But if Israel never existed, obviously we still would have supported thugs and death squads in Latin American, and also dictatorships in the Middle East. The details perhaps would have been different.

    • Donald March 11, 2012 at 1:25 pm with 17 replies

      It's not so much the country, it's the lobbying groups here. And there's obviously something weird about the way Congress is almost 100 percent behind Israel and cheers wildly for an idiot politician like Netanyahu. Of all the issues to be bipartisan about, why would support for a country with abysmal human rights policies that is run by a moron be the one that brings Congress together?

      The US is trying to get everyone in the world to line up against Iran. Is it a conspiracy theory to imagine that this priority might impact on other parts of our foreign policy?

    • Donald March 11, 2012 at 12:46 pm

      Very interesting post. Maybe others had brought up these possible links, but some of it was new ground for me, the China part in particular.

      Slightly off topic, but Chris Hayes did a show on Israel and America this morning. I only saw the middle portion of a two hour program, but it was good, and way way above what you'd normally see in the MSM.

  • Israel's bogus case for bombing Gaza obscures political motives
    • Donald March 11, 2012 at 12:54 pm with 2 replies

      "We thoroughly condemn terrorist rocket fire from Gaza into southern Israeli towns & cities and call on both sides to restore calm.""

      Yet more evidence the US can't function as an honest broker in this conflict. Some other group or organization has to do it.

  • Obama victory over Netanyahu gained support, time
    • Donald March 12, 2012 at 9:50 am with 7 replies

      "Guarded optimism" might be about right. Obama is utterly cynical and two-faced when it comes to the moral positions of the two sides--he praises Israel's "values" and never condemns their violence while condemning Palestinian terrorism, but he's not a complete idiot.

      On the other hand he's not always too swift either. He came into office as a centrist (it was obvious to some of us) with Obama-worshiping progressives under the largely self-inflicted delusion that he was one of them. But he had his own delusion, which is that he could ally himself with centrist Republicans and centrist Democrats and throw the left wing of the Democrats along with the right wing of the Republicans under the bus and govern that way. Unfortunately for him there was no Republican center he could ally with. He only looks good now because the Republican right has overreached.

      I think his Mideast policy has been the same. He tried steering a centrist tack, condemning Palestinian terror but demanding a cessation of settlement building and the rightwing Israelis trampled over him. He only looks good now because the Israeli right has overreached on demanding an immediate war. But Obama is the one who has declared that an Iranian bomb would mean war and is pushing for harsh sanctions, just like in domestic policy he embraced most of the Republican positions, only to see them shift so far to the right he seemed reasonable in comparison.

      You can't trust this guy. He's not as crazy as the right. It doesn't make him a hero.

  • Israelis 'were looking to kill me' in '02-- Shadid
    • Donald March 10, 2012 at 5:19 pm

      Shadid was more nuanced than you. You don't think Arabs in general couldn't have been disgusted with multiple things? For instance, that Egyptians weren't disgusted with Mubarak's collaboration with Israel in the Gaza siege? It's possible to hold two thoughts in your head at once, pz77. Ordinary Arabs are probably concerned first and foremost with their own domestic affairs, but it doesn't mean that, in the case of Egypt, they weren't concerned about the I/P conflict and their own government's role in it.

  • Israel strikes Gaza, killing 11, injuring 16
    • Donald March 14, 2012 at 10:23 am with 1 replies

      Interesting about the comment list. I only see one comment, clicked on "all" and still just saw one.

      On his point, I agree that we on the "hard left" shouldn't justify rockets launched at civilians or sound dismissive of them, but what Burston completely ignores in that column is the fact that the mainstream discussion doesn't follow the lead of Human Rights Watch in condemning the violence of both sides, but rather is more like the Obama Administration (including Obama) in condemning the rocket fire as terrible violence while passing over or even justifying the Israeli violence that kills far more people. Among the "hard left" you will find some people who actually support the rocket fire, but the people who don't support it, but sound dismissive are reacting to the vast hypocrisy in the US political mainstream. (I think Annie is in that second group, but she'll probably come along here and speak for herself.)

      Burston has to know this, or if he doesn't it's because he wants to make his own sort of dismissive point. He writes a piece about the "hard left" in order to stick a label on all of them as terrorist supporters. He doesn't want them to have a voice, so he trashes them all without making distinctions. If he wanted to write an honest piece he'd make distinctions and talk about the "liberal Zionists" and "supporters of the two state solution" and other "supporters of Israel" who never condemn Israeli atrocities and who dominate the American press and Congress.

  • ‏A letter from under attack
    • Donald March 11, 2012 at 12:57 pm

      "Apologetics for Israeli violence (focusing on those incidents which might be self defense and ignoring all others, "

      I should have emphasized the word "MIGHT" in the phrase "might be self defense"--in this latest act of Israeli violence, as is so often the case, it requires a real act of faith to assume it really was self-defense.

    • Donald March 11, 2012 at 12:29 pm

      "Peace is attainable, Pamela, but only if we allow ourselves to see past blind rage."

      Izik appears to be filling the gap left by RW, the guy who says he is for peace but condemns Palestinian violence and doesn't bother to condemn anything Israel does. Palestinian violence should be met with "harsh reprisals", but merely listing what Israel has done is (to him) "blind rage". In the spirit of the famous JSF post outlining the four rules of defending Israel, we could label it number five and call it the "shooting and crying" defense. The three parts are as mentioned--
      A) Beautiful sentiments in favor of peace
      B) Condemnation of Palestinian violence
      C) Apologetics for Israeli violence (focusing on those incidents which might be self defense and ignoring all others, and dismissing condemnations of Israeli behavior)

    • Donald March 10, 2012 at 4:58 pm

      "I favor an end to all hostilities. It is really that simple."

      No it's not. You come across as someone who will downplay Israeli oppression of Palestinians and defend every act of violence by Israelis as "self defense". Perhaps that's wrong, but it's a pattern we've seen before. To show yourself different you'd have to acknowledge that Israel has often been guilty of indiscriminate violence and that the blockade of Gaza was wrong and make a few other honest statements about the crimes of your side (I'm assuming you are Israeli) and after that, you would have credibility if you said you favored very careful targeting of actual terrorists when it was absolutely necessary to protect civilians. Personally, I wouldn't disagree with that. But in the real world Israel has done the wrong thing so often and killed civilians so many times the IDF does not deserve the benefit of a doubt.

      Moral consistency, in other words. Most of the Zionists (with rare exceptions) who come here clearly don't know what that is. If you wish to make the point that violence against Israeli civilians is wrong, as you do above, then I agree. But it cuts both ways.

      And to the rest of the MW community--in the event that Izik isn't morally consistent (which is the case with the majority of Zionists who come here), how is this argument any different from the endless ones we've had with RW, eee, and many others? I'd suggest someone compile a list of the best responses from this and other blogs, number them, provide links, and we can save ourselves the trouble of repeating this discussion several times a week every week for years at a stretch. I won't do it. Sounds like work.

  • Fact checker fact checker find me a fact
    • Donald March 9, 2012 at 4:04 pm

      On a related topic, look at who isn't mentioned in this NYT story today?

      In Israel pondering Iranian threat but taking panic off the table

      All the usual cliches trotted out, heroic Israelis, constantly facing doomsday threats, etc....

      Not one word about the views of Palestinians (I believe a few still live in Jerusalem, not having been expelled yet) or that 20 percent of the Israeli citizenry that don't count in such stories. But surely if the Dastardly Evil Iranian Nuclear Armed Hitler-Loving Islamofascists were going to nuke Israel with their Doomsday Weapons of Muslim Evilosity (okay, I made that word up) , a few Palestinians would be killed too. Why not tell us if they are equally heroic and nonchalant, eating hummus and laughing in the face of danger?

  • The radicalization of Yossi Gurvitz
    • Donald March 10, 2012 at 5:08 pm

      " Gurvitz cites the second intifada as a major trauma from which Israel needs to recover in order to get the majority of the society rested enough to deal with the situation rationally. This idea is never mentioned by Phil and it is good to hear it from Gurvitz."

      It's mentioned all the frigging time, it seems to me, though not by Phil. I didn't need to hear it from RW countless times to be aware of it. We all know the storyline--Barak made an incredibly generous offer, Arafat didn't budge, the intifada broke out, then the terrible suicide bombings, and the Israeli peace camp just melted away and Benny Morris decided that the problem with the Nakba was it hadn't been thorough enough.

      Look, it's obvious that the suicide bombings of the second intifada would traumatize Israelis. Understood. 1000 civilian deaths in a population of several million would be traumatizing. At some point maybe it will cross Israeli minds that the Palestinians lost several times that number of civilians and live under much harsher conditions.

      "his usage of the “Judeo Nazi” rhetoric was one of the keys to his marginalization by Israeli society"

      I don't like the usage, but how is it that every enemy Israel has ever had gets compared to Hitler? I wouldn't use the Nazi comparison for various reasons, including the fact that it might chase people away, but one can't help but notice how often Israelis use it themselves.

  • Freedom Funnies: ‘You Can’t Just Continue’ Part II
    • Donald March 10, 2012 at 11:16 am

      "Understanding the facts is hard enough with all of the conflicting assertions of what the facts are. My point is that adding fictional characters and fictional accounts to the mix is not helpful. "

      As Ethan says, this has nothing at all to do with his piece, which is non-fiction.

      But it's an interesting point and I feel the same way to some extent. All the same, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" had a revolutionary effect on the slavery debate in the US and for a very good reason--in its sentimentalized way (standard for 19th century fiction) it conveyed the fact which apparently many whites at the time hadn't really thought about that the slaves were human beings and some of them were willing to take heroic risks for the sake of freeing themselves and their children. Personally I prefer a factual report on actual human rights violations as opposed to a fictional account where someone could dismiss as the product of someone's imagination, but when I read Stowe's book some years ago I could see why it had the impact it did.

    • Donald March 9, 2012 at 9:09 am

      I understand your points and agree with one of them. There are two that I see--

      1. You don't like unsubtle nasty humor. Without necessarily agreeing about Michael Moore (I thought the Heston scene in his anti-gun movie was a cheap shot, but mostly I think he's on target), I agree that humor that hits people over the head a little too hard or is offensive might sometimes do more harm than good.
      2. You think "funnies" should be funny. No disrespect intended, but that's just your personal foible. It's like me not caring for certain styles of music or art. This isn't an argument at all--you're just telling us your personal taste. There was nothing wrong with this piece--it conveys information, it's not nasty, but you were hoping for Doonesbury.

  • Friedman warns war could hurt American Jews
    • Donald March 7, 2012 at 10:53 pm

      "he was THANKING OBAMA for shifting the lens away from Israel and american jews by making “the iranian threat” a US/Worldwide problem to be dealt with. And cheers him on as he prepares americans to do the heavy lifting……"

      "That’s how I read it, too:"

      True, but you shouldn't expect to see any genuinely principled statement from Tom Friedman on this subject. He's always been a big believer in the US bombing pesky foreigners. He's also not one you could accuse of favoring Israel over the US--when push comes to shove he sides with Obama over Netanyahu. He's an imperialist, but an American one.

      What was interesting was his admission that a war on Iran could be blamed on the Israel lobby. Of course he then goes on to praise Obama for his slippery way of being a more subtle kind of warmonger.

  • Hasbarapocalypse at Ynet: 'Zionism will only cease being demonized when the West stops demonizing colonialism'
    • Donald March 7, 2012 at 9:20 am

      "Perhaps you are being facetious here"

      I'll never tell. On the article, I believed it was legit at first, but then was persuaded it had to be a hoax because it was so ridiculous, but then, why would that mean it had to be a hoax? Right now I'm in a quantum superposition of belief states.

    • Donald March 6, 2012 at 9:07 pm with 2 replies

      "So you are going with the “spoof” angle, too?"

      Sounds like it. It fooled me since I don't think it's too different from what I used to read in "Commentary". But that photo Shmuel linked seemed conclusive.

    • Donald March 6, 2012 at 6:48 pm

      "Would there honestly be little or no opposition to Israeli actions if all its Jewish inhabitants were indigenous in 1948? Would that excuse ethnically cleansing a majority of non-Jewish Palestinians, and denying the human rights of the few that remained?"

      Okay, good point, but in the cases that I can think of that are most similar to Israel and the Palestinians you have some group of European descent moving into an already inhabited land and taking over. That's all I meant. Sure, it'd be just as objectionable if group A and group B had lived there all along, and then group A decided to drive out or enslave or oppress or (worst case) wipe out group B.

      I hadn't noticed snowdrift made my point upthread, so my second post was redundant.

    • Donald March 6, 2012 at 3:53 pm with 4 replies

      From the opening paragraphs--

      "It is a curious paradox that despite its many achievements in all fields, Israel has yet to craft a convincing strategy to combat anti-Zionism. One of the reasons for this is that the roots of this phenomenon have been misdiagnosed.

      Leftist anti-Zionism is not bred by anti-Semitism. The secular intelligentsia that supports Palestinians abhors Christian anti-Semitism and Nazi racism. Their favorite thinkers are Jewish intellectuals like Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, and Noam Chomsky. These anti-Zionists gladly rally against neo-Nazis and have no qualms about socializing with or marrying Jews. "

      The fascinating thing about this article is that the author mostly gets it right. The roots of anti-Zionism are in anti-colonialism (at least on the left end of the spectrum) and if more liberals realized this and understood that to defend Israel you have to use some of the same arguments that defenders of colonialism use, it's going to change a lot of minds.

      Though not all minds. IMO a fair number of self-described liberals really do have the old colonial mentality, even if they don't admit it, and so their defense of Israel is not some bizarre inconsistency but part of how they think about the rest of the world. The NYT editorialists sometimes come across this way.

    • Donald March 6, 2012 at 3:37 pm with 5 replies

      "The politically correct depiction of the colonialist as a racist and covetous brute must give space to the majority of well-meaning administrators that helped build roads, schools, and hospitals for the natives."

      This is pretty much standard talk on the right. Back when I used to read it, COMMENTARY always seemed to be publishing articles trying to whitewash the colonial days, long before Niall Ferguson got in the act. But not just the right--I think a fair number of self-described liberals would also make the same arguments. It underlies the brutality of Western foreign policy in general--we're bombing, invading, and overthrowing governments for their own good.

      The irony is that the same arguments could be made for the Soviets in Afghanistan. They were standing up for modernization, women's rights, the 20th century against people who threw acid in the face of college coeds who didn't keep them covered. And Afghanistan descended into further chaos when they left, which only ended when the Taliban took over. So there's probably something wrong with an argument that could be employed to justify the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. (Chomsky used to point out how similar the justifications the Soviets gave for their war were to our justification for being in Vietnam.)

      And yes, many of the arguments defending Israel are from the same school of thought, just given a particular ethno-religious twist.

  • 'New Yorker' defends Rosenberg (and use of term 'Israel firster')
    • Donald March 7, 2012 at 8:26 am

      I remember him doing that, but it was years ago and he might have changed. After all, before that he worked for AIPAC.

  • Blasting Obama as 'blurred,' McConnell assures Israel lobby that bipartisan Congress will authorize 'overwhelming force' against Iran
    • Donald March 6, 2012 at 9:57 pm

      "I hope we don’t get into a war, but if we do I hope we win with minimal damage to us."

      Just "to us"? Personally, I hope that if we get into war it's fought along the lines seen in historical re-enactments of the Batley townswomen--

      Re-enactment of Pearl Harbor

  • 'We are you and you are us,' Netanyahu says-- but Obama thumbs him with talk of Palestinians and diplomacy
    • Donald March 5, 2012 at 7:38 pm with 1 replies

      "what happened to the comments? I can’t find them. "

      They're still there. 378 when I checked just now.

      "And smile about the NYT editor’s Pick"

      It's often interesting comparing the NYT picks with the reader's picks on this subject. I wouldn't want to swear to this, but it's my impression that letters critical of Israel tend to get more "thumbs up" votes than the ones supportive of them. Which is surprising if true. I don't know what it would show about either NYT readers or Americans in general, if anything.

  • How Tony Judt broke with exclusivist ideology
    • Donald March 5, 2012 at 1:07 pm

      Very good points, and very well put, newclench, not that I live up to the standard of behavior you suggest we follow. But I think you're right. It's why I always liked the book "The Lemon Tree" by Sandy Tolan. He is clearly very critical of Israel and much of the book is about the Nakba, but much of the book is also about the Holocaust, focusing as it does on two people whose families were devastated by the two events. It's about the most fairminded book I could imagine anyone writing on the subject.

  • California congresswoman: 'Some would call that apartheid'
    • Donald March 6, 2012 at 4:15 pm

      "“For that matter, we don’t let the Afghans vote in our elections and we do occupy them.”

      Stupid analogy. The operations in Afghanistan, among other things, is at the behest of the the UN Security Counsel, while the Israel occupation is in violation of it."

      Adding to that, suppose there were pleasant parts of Afghanistan that some Americans wanted to live in. So they stole some of the land and built permanent , constantly expanding settlements protected by the American military. Does any sane person have any difficulty seeing what would be wrong with this, even if you believed the war in Afghanistan was justified?

      I mean, come on. Even if one believed (wrongly) that Israel was always the innocent victim attacked by Arab nations in all of its wars, and even if one thought that the occupation of the West Bank was something forced on Israel by circumstances and that it wasn't their fault that the occupation continued--even if you believed all of this the settlements are still wrong and this makes the situation a form of apartheid.

      If I believed all of the Zionist claims about who started all the wars and all the claims about having no partner for peace, there would still be no way of defending the existence of the settlements. If there were no peace agreement and no end to the occupation in the next 100 years, the settlements should still be uprooted.

  • In 45 minutes with Obama, Goldberg asks repeatedly about Iran, nothing about Palestinians
    • Donald March 2, 2012 at 4:22 pm

      An arms race in the region would be bad. If we want to do something about that, perhaps it is time to be honest and open about who has nuclear weapons in the region already and which country is threatening to attack which one. And then we could talk about how when Israel says an Iranian nuke is an existential threat, it suggests they might use any means necessary to stop it.

      This isn't snark. Israel is the one threatening to go to war and they probably can't ensure that Iran can't create a nuclear weapon if it wants to with the merely conventional weapons at their disposal. So either they get us to join in, which means a wider conventional war, or they use their nukes.
      If, of course, they really mean all they say about the seriousness of the threat. Once they have bombed with conventional weapons and if that doesn't work, which it probably won't, what are they going to do next?

      And even if they don't decide to use their nukes, how can the Iranians be sure of that? So if there really is a desire for a nuclear free zone in the Mideast, it's hard to avoid remembering who has the Bomb there.

      And also, suppose Israel really did reach a mutually agreeable peace settlement with the Palestinians, whether 1 state or 2 (both seem unlikely at the moment). How exactly does Iran justify its anti-Israel position then? If the Palestinians themselves tell the Iranians to back off, the issue doesn't work for them. So if Israel is worried about hatred from its neighbors, you'd think they'd be desperately trying to reach a genuinely fair settlement with the Palestinians.

    • Donald March 2, 2012 at 4:00 pm

      "Friends of mine who are intelligent people respond to my pleas to them to do as little as write their Congresspeople with “why do you care about this so much?"

      That's interesting, but unsurprising. Some Americans care nothing about what we do to people overseas, and then act confused or morally outraged when some foreigner is anti-American.

  • If you name your group 'Emergency Committee for Israel,' do you get to call people bigots when they say you're an 'Israel Firster'?
    • Donald March 2, 2012 at 12:09 pm with 1 replies

      “Yeah, Spencer Ackerman is something else.”

      Something incoherent. This has been one weird performance. I liked him when he had turned against the Iraq War, but he’s really shoved his foot deep into his alimentary canal. What do you say about a guy who criticizes others for using inflammatory rhetoric and then has a picture next to his article comparing people like you to Hitler? What’s he going to do next? Accuse you of cruelty to animals and then find some puppy to kick?

  • J Street's call for Iran diplomacy earns ire of Jewish establishment
    • Donald March 2, 2012 at 9:47 am with 2 replies

      Since Keith Ellison was sympathetic to the Gazans I'm surprised he supports the sanctions. But maybe not too surprised--he is a politician.

      The mainstream American debate seems to be between those who argue that the Iranians can't be bombed soon enough, and those who think that bombing them might pose a danger to people who matter (Americans and Israelis) and so we should starve the Iranians for now, since we can always bomb them later. That's how debates are generally conducted with the "serious" people.

      And all snark aside, it's a way of framing things that means that people who enter the mainstream discussion and argue in those terms are accepting the mainstream consensus and end up supporting the premise that Iran has to be stopped through any means necessary. Keith Ellison probably means well and is trying to oppose war by supporting what he perceives as the least bad politically viable option. But he ends up supporting sanctions.

  • The last time a Democratic president took on Benjamin Netanyahu...
    • Donald March 2, 2012 at 1:32 pm with 2 replies

      Meanwhile, there are a lot of bad things done by Israel which we know really happened. For instance, earlier today I posted a link to a Tablet magazine article outlining the Israeli/American connection to the Guatemalan genocide in the early 80's--it's topical because Rios Montt, the worst of the Guatemalan dictators, was recently indicted for genocide. I apologized in the other thread for going off-topic, but in this case that seems like a plus--

      link

      Possibly I'm being a little too snarky, but I don't get the point of this post unless there is actual evidence. There are so many real things that we know beyond question that Israel is guilty of doing.

  • Consequences of an attack on Iran are no joke
    • Donald March 2, 2012 at 9:27 am

      This is off-topic, but I think most will be interested. The link is to a Tablet magazine article about the links between Israel and Guatemala and more particularly, the links between Israel and its most genocidal dictator, Efraim Rios Montt. Montt was just indicted for genocide (in late January).

      Tablet link

      I found out about this from reading the current issue of the Nation Nation link ,but while they mention US support for the dictator, Israel goes unmentioned.

      Not to distract attention from the warmongering against Iran, but I think this blog missed the Tablet Guatemala story when it came out or anyway I didn't see it.

  • Responding to commenters on recent bannings
    • Donald March 5, 2012 at 8:15 pm

      "It’s tough debating people who have less developed value systems than yourself."

      True, dat. Not that I'd know. It just sounds right.

      "So you guys think censorship is funny."

      Nah, what was funny was the canonization of RW, whatever one thinks of his banning.

      As for censorship at a blog, my view is in flux. Currently I think several things, one of which is that unmoderated and uncensored blogs on hot emotional topics usually have comment sections which are largely worthless. Not completely worthless because if you're willing to wade through a lot of nonsense you might see some good comments too. Moderation improves blogs, unless the moderator is biased, and that accusation always comes up. Suppose it is true. Then you have to make a judgment call--is the blog otherwise worthwhile? The greatest blog in the history of blogdom was the late, great and much lamented "Whisky Bar", which had a comment section which was overpopulated and often insane. The proprietor would get grumpy and ban people just to watch their blog personas die. Sometimes I was annoyed by his decision. His blog, his rules, and given that the comment section drove him nuts I thought he made the right decision to just shut the damn thing down. Unfortunately he then shut the blog down. Bummer.

      On the other hand, who in his or her right mind cares what nonsense is posted in a blog comment section anyway?

      On the gripping hand, (an obscure SF reference), free speech is great but a lot of people should exercise their freedom and shut up. Most definitely including me. Look at this comment. It will almost certainly do no good and I'm just typing it because it amuses me to do so. Self expression. WHEEE!

      And on some random bodily appendage, perhaps a foot, blogs in general have been great in that they've allowed opinions suppressed by the MSM to be expressed, sometimes in ways that even the MSM has to acknowledge now and then. The MSM strikes back by portraying bloggers and their fan base as a bunch of disgruntled crackpots. There's a bit of truth in that too sometimes.

    • Donald March 5, 2012 at 4:11 pm

      "A good rule of thumb is that it is probably not legal to treat Palestinians in ways that would be considered criminal if they happened to be Norwegian or Jewish."

      Makes sense to me. Thanks hostage.

    • Donald March 5, 2012 at 1:54 pm

      " is he implying there was an initial plan that accommodated their return? any evidence of that?"

      I don't remember. My copy of the book is at home and I read it nearly ten years ago. I might or might not look for what he has to say tonight. The military motive was, I think, the standard one in wars that are at least partly guerilla wars--don't let enemy guerilla fighters have a safe haven. It's why the US uprooted so many South Vietnamese villagers (which was also a crime, IMO). Personally, though, I can't see how someone could plan the uprooting of so many Arabs and not think to himself "Gosh, it sure would be demographically convenient for our Jewish state if they didn't come back." But you wouldn't necessarily put that down in writing.

      I think Benvenisti had some sort of evidence that some Zionists were planning for a state with a large number of Arabs, or that might be something I read elsewhere. My offhand reply to that argument is that governments (or para-governments) often have plans for all sorts of contingencies--some Zionists might have planned for a state with a great many Arabs (and might even have been sincere) while others might have been planning to expel as many as possible.

      Anyway, "Sacred Landscapes" is a book which is very sympathetic to the Palestinians driven out of their homes and very critical of what Israel did to them, so I don't think Benvenisti had bad motives in writing what he did and he does say that the treatment of the Palestinians ended up as a case of ethnic cleansing--he thought, and I'll have to find out why, that it didn't start out that way.

    • Donald March 5, 2012 at 1:13 pm

      Hostage--What would you say about someone like Meron Benvenisti, who in his book "Sacred Landscapes" makes a distinction between the motives behind Plan Dalet and what happened in the second half of the 1948 war. In his version of events Israel is clearly guilty of ethnic cleansing in the later parts and in not allowing refugees back in when the war is done, but he thinks Plan D had military motives and wasn't initially meant to be an ethnic cleansing campaign. Personally to me this distinction seems psychologically implausible, but I don't question Benvenisti's sincerity.

    • Donald March 3, 2012 at 12:51 pm

      "Yes, Donald, I welcome posts by eee, hophmi, WJ., Werdine and even Witty because they break the monotony of the talk about the Zionists and Israelis. "

      I don't follow. Without Zionists we sit around and talk about the crimes of Zionists. With Zionists present we hammer them over the head with the crimes of Zionists. Those of us (I was one of the chief offenders) who responded to Richard were criticized for allowing him to hijack the thread, but the fact is that when you set aside Richard's personal peculiarities the arguments we had with him about Israel's human rights record were more or less the same (minus all the ridicule that Richard elicited) that you'd have with most Zionists except the most liberal (like Jerry Slater). That happened with eee and Werdine and others too. After a while it's just the same old thing, over and over and over again. Here's my point--if one wants to talk about what Israel did in the Gaza War (i.e. slaughter), then the most effective case for saying that they committed war crimes has been laid out in long form in the Goldstone Report, by Amnesty International, by Human Rights Watch and others. In shorter form Jerome Slater has done a superb job on some aspects of it (including what led up to it). If one wants the Zionist case then I think there are people who could probably do a better job than Richard Witty--an Israeli philosopher named Halbertal took some potshots at Goldstone, I believe, and would probably make a better advocate for that side of things than any Zionist commenter who shows up at MW. The subject has been beaten to death here, but it keeps coming up because someone like Richard would bring up the old apologetics all over again. That's the nature of the blog. It probably doesn't matter whether any particular person is banned or not--so long as there are some Zionists and some anti-Zionists present the argument on that subject and all others will be endless, without anything new being said after one reads them a few times.

      That's one reason why a week ago when one of the new Zionists came here I supplied links to the Lawrence of Cyberia website. If someone seriously wants to understand the anti-Zionist case, there are better ways to do so than spending hours reading arguments in a blog comment section. The author of that website (Diane Mason) has done a superb job writing numerous articles and that's a much better way to learn the anti-Z case, for any newcomer here who is serious. If they just come to have arguments and enjoy the squabbling, then this is the better place.

      As for the rest of the Middle East, yes, I'd like to see more articles on that, but by people who really know the area. Not comments from people like me. At best someone like me might be able to supply an interesting link or two, or an occasional relevant fact.

    • Donald March 2, 2012 at 6:26 pm with 5 replies

      "Witty’s highjacking happened only because others jumped on the opportunity to start stoning him. "

      This comment sounds like disapproval of those who responded to Richard's posts.

      "With most of the hasbarists gone, we’re left all talking to each other about the things we already know."

      This comment sounds like you want hasbarists so we can talk to them about things, in which case it was fine to respond to Richard. I never know where people stood on that. Was Richard a good representative of liberal Zionism, and therefore someone we need to have around to debate, or was it a waste of time to debate him because liberal Zionism is clearly wrong or was it a waste of time because Richard was such an odd debater (to put it in neutral terms) and not such a good representative of any position?

      I'm sort of neutral on this banning thing. I wrote a rant about a month ago urging civility and also urging people not to talk as though Jews somehow provoked the Holocaust, because it's insane and anti-semitic.
      Who gets banned and who doesn't isn't that big a deal to me, because I'm used to other very good blogs where there are rules, people get banned, etc... So what? I'd read this blog if Phil and Adam did the As'ad AbuKhalil thing and just eliminated the comment section.

      As for civility, I'm not sure how it can work in practice. I'd like to see civility to people like Jerome Slater who acknowledges all the Israeli crimes against Palestinians, but actually find it a bit creepy when people are oh so polite to others who are defending war crimes. Why is politeness in that context necessarily a good thing? Why is it a defense of someone to say that they were polite if they defended war crimes? Doesn't it seem to say that we're discussing a topic where reasonable people can disagree in good faith? Should we have polite discussions about whether it is a good thing to commit atrocities? Then afterwards we can all go out for a drinks and laugh together, the way lawyers allegedly do after fighting in court.

      If this blog is supposed to be a place where people exchange ideas, the best thing to happen would be for most of us to shut up most of the time (that most definitely includes me) and let the people who know the most do most of the commenting, unless there's something really useful we think we can contribute. (This particular comment doesn't qualify, but since we're just commenting on commenting I don't suppose quality matters that much.)

      I would actually welcome seeing debate and discussion between anti-Zionists, various forms of Zionists, and also discussion of other developments in the Arab and/or Muslim world that have little directly to do with Israel, but by people who are experts. Some people here are pretty knowledgeable, but much of the comment section is just people expressing their emotional reaction to things (I do that a lot) and after awhile, who cares?

    • Donald March 1, 2012 at 9:49 pm with 8 replies

      " don’t recall reading any of Witty’s comments but the comments above demonstrate that he was reasonable and ‘polite’ and therefore by definition, not a troll."

      This is perhaps the best argument for banning him. We have lost Richard the troll, and gained Richard the legendary exemplar of politeness and reasonable argument. It's a win-win.

    • Donald March 1, 2012 at 7:41 pm

      "I’ll admit I don’t fall into either of these categories. I suppose I’ve dipped in here and there and happened to read Witty here and there, so, No, I can’t say that I know all about who he is or what he stands for. . ."

      "His tone was always polite. I never understood why people came unglued at what he was saying."

      Perhaps you answered your own question. I liked Richard's posts at first. That changed.

      We do need liberal Zionists around, I think, to challenge our positions and force us to defend them. The problem is that liberal Zionists will be badly outnumbered here and most people don't enjoy coming to a blog to defend a position knowing they will be bashed from all sides. What you are likely to end up with are angry people who come spoiling for a fight or perhaps people who come to practice their koan writing. One should try to be more civil, but the fact is that on fundamental moral issues tempers are likely to flare.

  • Barghouthi and Erakat can reach young Americans
    • Donald March 1, 2012 at 9:56 pm

      I'm assuming it's what WJ said--an image of a crucified Jesus kicking an Israeli soldier out of Bethlehem. I guess I would be diffident in telling a Palestinian how to criticize the IDF which makes their lives a misery, but I can safely say it's not an image I'd want to use or (mixing metaphors a bit) touch with a ten foot pole. There's a long history of Christians using the "Christkiller" epithet against Jews and so showing the image of Jesus, especially a crucified Jesus, being violent towards an Israeli just has bad vibes.

    • Donald March 1, 2012 at 7:57 pm with 3 replies

      "any unessential use of Jesus to comment on the I/P conflict is stepping on my toes. I realize that I sound censorious and unreasonable "

      " A cartoon of the crucified Jesus kicking an Israeli soldier out of Bethlehem (?)"

      Sometimes I read comment threads backwards, from the bottom up (I click on a link to the latest comment and go up from there). Sometime I even read a comment this way.

      I did it to yours and initially I thought you were being a little unreasonable, but having seen the specific objection--Jesus kicking an Israeli soldier out of Bethlehem--I think you're right. I'm a Christian and that made me wince.

      It's rather like that Jewish professor who specializes in Christian studies (or whatever) at Vanderbilt University. Her name came up a few weeks ago (I've forgotten it.) She gave a lecture on how liberal Christians should talk about the I/P conflict. I vehemently disagreed with part of it, because part of her talk is simply boilerplate not-terribly-liberal Zionism telling people not to criticize Israel too harshly. But when she was talking about the use of the Bible, she was dead-on. The last thing a Christian should do in speaking about current day problems is bring the crucifixion of Jesus into it. (She also pointed to other problematic uses of the Bible.) Save that sort of thing for the interfaith dialogue circuit.

      Of course, that said, it's different when a Palestinian does this as opposed to some American Christian. I think he should have avoided using it, but it's not the ugly sort of thing it would be if I did it. At the same time, Israelis shouldn't get to use the long history of anti-semitism to criticize Palestinians.

  • Ten reasons why AIPAC is so dangerous
    • Donald February 28, 2012 at 5:36 pm with 3 replies

      On a related note, Richard Silverstein just linked to this depressing (though not surprising) article written by the AP--

      link

      Note the claim near the end that the US offered to let Israel use US bases in an attack on Iran, so that they would keep us in the loop. Supposing that's true, this is the guy that partisan Democrats claim has a good record on foreign policy. Strange.

  • ADL enlists city of Oakland to block Atzmon event
    • Donald March 1, 2012 at 7:15 pm

      "What hurts the perception of Jewish people more? The musings of one man, or whole Jewish organizations exerting titanic gravitational pull on American politics to make the US a virtual proxy for the policies of the self-styled “Jewish nation?” To the point where American troops will be dying in Iran because Israel wants that?"

      I agree that AIPAC and others are a much bigger problem than the anti-semitic ravings of one solitary attention-seeking jazz musician, but I would put it differently. Think of it this way--it's true that the actions of Islamic suicide bombers cause a problem for the perception of Muslim people, but that is no excuse for Islamophobia. One should keep the issues separate. Terrorism in the name of Islam is a problem, but it's no excuse for Islamophobia and we should come down like a ton of bricks on anyone who thinks it is. The same is true of Israeli crimes and anti-semitism. Now I happen to agree with the consensus of people in this blog that in the US at least anti-Arab and/or anti-Muslim sentiment is a far greater danger to human life than anti-semitism in the US happens to be--we start wars in part because of Islamophobia, but aren't going to start wars because of anti-semitism. So that's why I'd say AIPAC is a much much bigger problem than Atzmon. It still doesn't excuse Atzmon.

      Everyone else should speak out against the crimes of terrorists and those people who actually support them, and everyone should speak out against the crimes of Israel and the people who support them, and everyone should speak out against Islamophobes who use the crimes of Muslim extremists as an excuse for bigotry and everyone should speak out against anti-semites who use the crimes of Israel as a reason for making anti-semitic generalizations about Jews. Okay, that sentence was way too long, but I don't have time to think about how to be pithy here.

      Anyway, the problem with Atzmon is not that his views are likely to spread--until I came to this blog I never even heard of him and anyway, I think that if people notice his more unsavory comments they will just write him off as a nut. The problem is that if anti-Zionists start inviting this guy to conferences to give talks, he can be used to discredit anti-Zionism as anti-semitism.

      That's enough about him. What really bothered me today was seeing that op ed piece by the Israeli guy in the NYT justifying war with Iran, but I see Phil put up a piece by David Bromwich on that.

    • Donald March 1, 2012 at 7:00 pm

      "Excuse me, but that is not a worthy argument."

      Salwa, David was joking.

    • Donald March 1, 2012 at 9:18 am with 2 replies

      I agree with David Samel about Atzmon. As for the ADL, if they had any sense they'd be defending Atzmon's free speech rights--from their perspective he's like a dream come true, the man who explicitly links anger at Israel today with European "anger" at Jews in the 1930's. Pure propaganda gold. They should secretly pay his airfare and put him up at the best hotels anytime he wants to speak at an anti-Zionist event.

    • Donald February 29, 2012 at 12:22 am

      For what it is worth, As'ad AbuKhalil (The Angry Arab blogger) thinks Atzmon is an anti-semite and doesn't think the pro-Palestinian movement should have anything to do with him.

      link

      I read the quotes in the Monthly Review article and this one stood out, taken from another publication. It seemed to be in context, unless the other publication screwed up. Anyway, Atzmon is reported to have said--

      "The remarkable fact is they don’t understand why the world is beginning to stand against them in the same way they didn’t understand why the Europeans stood against them in the 1930s."

      Does anyone on the pro-Palestinian side really want to identify our anger with Israel with the European anti-semitism in the 1930's? If so, you've just endorsed the ADL's view of the pro-Palestinian movement. Atzmon is linking a modern movement in favor of justice and universal human rights with the feelings in Europe that led to ethnic cleansing, mass killing, and genocide. Personally, I don't find this helpful. It also seems implausible. Your typical Amnesty International member probably doesn't view the world the same way as the person who applauded Kristallnacht.

      The fact that Atzmon says some things critical of Israel that we might agree with doesn't cancel out the nasty things he also says. Or it shouldn't.

  • Harvard's 'one-state' conference spurs 'National Review Online' to suggest expelling Palestinians from Jewish state
    • Donald February 28, 2012 at 6:37 pm

      "In other words, Israel is not going to agree to anything
      that spells it’s destruction.

      Note that destruction has become an Israeli euphamism for debning Israelis everythign they want."

      Using inflated language like that seems to work for them in the propaganda wars. It shifts the goalposts--Israel's theft in 1948 is automatically off the table and then negotiations begin over what is left, and then the next step is to call Israel's willingness to give up some remaining portion of the 22 percent a "generous offer".

      Even if one supported the 2ss out of some belief that it is the pragmatic solution, as Finkelstein does, it's a mistake to use Israeli language (the "destruction" of Israel) regarding the 1ss the way Finkelstein did. That's what annoyed me the most about his recent interview (the one he then requested be pulled offline). If the Palestinians choose to go for a 2ss, they're already conceding 78 percent of their homeland and that's the "generous offer". If instead one talks about their right of return as "the destruction of Israel" then that's like telling the Israelis that they had every right to steal the land, the Palestinian ROR is somehow genocidal and should be given up right from the start, and the Israelis are being very decent in showing the willingness to someday allow Palestinians any land at all, after they negotiate for it (during which process Israel further tells the Palestinians which portion of land it is willing to give up and which parts it intends to keep. ) Which apparently is how some of our recent commenters see it.

    • Donald February 28, 2012 at 3:11 pm

      "Still waiting on you comment regarding the Kemp David proposal.
      You keep ignoring it because it just so inconveniently messes with you
      beliefs?"

      Annie responded to it before and after you posted this, but anyway, it's depressing though not surprising to see yet another person spreading the notion that Barak made a generous offer at Camp David, when even Shlomo Ben-Ami, who is no fan for Arafat, said that the Camp David offer was inadequate. The myth of the generous offer at Camp David has been discredited over and over again. It doesn't matter what some Saudi prince says--it's kind of funny how someone from the Saudi monarchy suddenly becomes an expert on what is an acceptable solution to a human rights issue when he says something favoring Israel.

      Here's a link to a debate/discussion between Finkelstein and Shlomo Ben-Ami on Camp David and Taba--

      link

  • Hoenlein says irresponsible 'J Street' threatens Jewish unity (and survival)
    • Donald February 25, 2012 at 4:13 pm with 1 replies

      That's a fair point, but the actually existing "center" as opposed to some idealized reasonable center has been,when push came to shove, in Israel's pocket. Take the Clinton Administration. Clinton really did pressure Israel to some extent and disliked Netanyahu when he was in power in the mid 90's, but when the 2000 Camp David meeting failed to produce an agreement the Clinton Administration and many of the centrist liberals (like Tom Friedman) all united around a fairy story that said Barak made a remarkably generous offer and the failure of the talks was all Arafat's fault.

      Who is in the center these days? Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein. It's ironic, but true. They both emphasize international law, a 2SS, Israel's (legal) right to exist, but they also see that Israel is the side largely to blame for the lack of a 2SS . In the world of American politics that puts them on the far far left.

      As for Mondoweiss, for better or worse I don't think we're that important. The blog itself is probably making some impact in the sense that it gets quoted sometimes by Glenn Greenwald and people like that, but the fact that we commenters might or might not cheer for the collapse of a 2SS has little or nothing to do with the improbability of a 2SS. It's Israel's own actions and its American supporters (including many self-proclaimed supporters of the 2SS) who have made it seem like a rather remote prospect. American liberals have claimed for decades that they support a 2SS, and yet the settlements keep growing and nothing seems to shake America's support. That's why the 2ss is on life support.

  • Video: Protesters are attacked at an 'Israel Alliance' event at U of New Mexico
    • Donald February 26, 2012 at 4:09 pm

      One of the unfortunate things about this blog (not that it's different anywhere else so far as I can tell) is that the personal quarrels sometimes overshadow the political ones. Anyway, in David's 12:21 post the politically interesting points are in his second paragraph. But if people want to argue about who insulted whom and so forth it's my impression that in the Chomsky/Blankfort debates, people on both sides have been pretty vicious towards each other.

    • Donald February 25, 2012 at 10:17 am

      The KKK analogy is one I'm not sure I know how to answer. I wasn't thinking of it in those terms. In general I think even noxious people should be able to give speeches in public places, but if open hatred is being espoused it's not realistic to expect people to sit quietly for it. So I'll just leave it there.

    • Donald February 24, 2012 at 7:56 pm with 2 replies

      I agree. I don't think racist speech from an invited speaker should be disrupted unless the university doesn't allow anti-racists to organize their own events. If Ali Abunimah couldn't be invited to this campus and give a speech without it being disrupted then yes, it is legitimate to disrupt speech by Israel supporters. Otherwise no. You can still protest, silently inside the auditorium or loudly outside the building.

  • Weir criticizes lack of diversity in NYT's Jerusalem appointments
    • Donald February 23, 2012 at 10:39 am with 9 replies

      "Ethan Bronner, who was preceded by Steven Erlanger, who was preceded by James Bennet, who was preceded by Deborah Sontag. All, according to an Israeli report, are Jewish."

      Sontag was good though--I don't know about the others offhand. But Sontag wrote a long piece (I don't have time to look for it) in the NYT which undermined the claim that Arafat was totally to blame for turning down a generous Israeli offer at Camp David and triggering the second intifada.

      On the other hand, Anthony Shadid's death prevents us from knowing if the NYT would have ever assigned him to cover the I/P conflict, but my guess is "no".

  • Hasbara: Reach-out to non-Jews with 'Zionist-inspired' calendar
    • Donald February 18, 2012 at 12:28 pm

      It says something worse. Briefly, some bad guys tried to kill the Jews. But Esther persuaded the king to side with the Jews, who were then allowed to slaughter their enemies, specifically including women and children. It doesn't actually say in the next chapter whether that happened, but the claim is that 75,000 enemies of unspecified gender and age were slaughtered. The Book of Esther is not one of the more edifying books in the Bible.

      (See verse 8:11)

      link

  • BDS interview fallout: Finkelstein 'showed his own fear of the paradigm shift in discourse on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict'
    • Donald February 17, 2012 at 10:57 am with 1 replies

      Thanks Shingo. I'm trying to participate in a limited way with occasional comments making some specific point. With RW apparently gone this should be easy.

      I think part of the underlying problem with the NF interview is just his personality type. He goes for the jugular. That might be okay when the opponent deserves it, but it doesn't seem appropriate when it's a difference of opinion on the best way to reach a solution that respects everyone's human rights. To make his case for the 2ss over the 1ss I don't think he had to use the sort of rhetoric ("the destruction of Israel") that you'd expect from Jonah Goldberg. Does he really want to say that about Palestinians who want to exercise their right to live in their own homeland? And maybe he realizes that in retrospect and (I'm guessing) that's why he wanted the interview pulled.

    • Donald February 16, 2012 at 4:25 pm with 15 replies

      I'd be curious to know where Norman thinks he addressed David Samel's point 4. I thought Finkelstein could have made his case for a 2ss as strongly as he wanted without stooping to the language he chose to use ("destruction of Israel") to characterize the aims of people who support a 1ss.

  • Norman Finkelstein slams the BDS movement calling it 'a cult'
    • Donald February 15, 2012 at 4:52 pm with 2 replies

      Yeah, Norman was disappointing here. He might be right on the pragmatics--I don't pretend to know anymore what the pragmatic solution is these days, but I suppose he's right that by international law there's a consensus in favor of a two state solution along the 67 lines. But he could have made that case without stooping to using the term "destruction of Israel". He knows perfectly well that a phrase like that has connotations of genocide--that's the emotional wallop it possesses. So if any Palestinian wants the right of return, by Finkelstein's logic they "want the destruction of Israel". Well, that's not exactly fair to Palestinians--portraying their natural desire to return to their homeland as some destructive impulse.

  • You won't have Ethan Bronner to kick around anymore . . .
    • Donald February 18, 2012 at 2:44 pm

      The fact that the NYT is criticized from the right as "anti-Zionist" (a charge I've seen) doesn't mean that the NYT is therefore doing a good job and reporting the issue fairly.

      As for Bronner, his reporting was mixed--sometimes okay, sometimes not. Below I've linked to an example from 2004 where he betrays his bias. I'm thinking of the moral obtuseness on display, where he seems to equate Zionist war crimes against Palestinian civilians with recommendations by Arab leaders that people flee war zones. This is idiotic. If one wants to argue that both sides committed atrocities, that's fair, because both sides did commit atrocities. That would be revolutionary in a NYT context, because it would be an admission that the Zionist side was guilty of war crimes and it isn't just Arabs who target civilians. Instead, though, Bronner tries to spin it as though war crimes committed by Zionists against Arab civilians are the same as telling your own civilians to flee for their own safety.

      link

      I'm sure it would never cross Bronner's mind to say something like that if he was discussing Arab crimes against Jewish civilians. He wouldn't say that both Jewish and Arab leaders shared the blame for the expulsion of Jews from parts of Palestine because Arabs killed or expelled Jews, while Jewish leaders might have recommended that Jewish civilians should be prepared to flee their homes for their own safety.

  • New book explores the history of 'New Jewish Agenda'
    • Donald February 25, 2012 at 10:00 am

      "The caveat that criticism of Israel that is just like criticism of other countries is too vague to be useful. "

      I meant to correct the grammar here--I meant that the caveat that it's okay to criticize Israel in terms that you'd use to criticize any other country is a useless caveat as stated.

      The legitimate point is this--some people who criticize Israel do so because of anti-semitic motives. But others single out Israel for other perfectly valid reasons. A good rule of thumb is that it's anti-semitism if the person seems to dislike Jews in general. (If they're really clever they might conceal that, but short of a mindreading device if they're that clever there's not much to say.)

    • Donald February 25, 2012 at 9:41 am

      "The problem for you is Israel treats its minorities (I’m excluding the territories for clarity before you conflate them again) in a way that isn’t comparable to the Nazis, the working definition takes this into account,"

      Is there a link? The EU definition is actually this fine-grained, that they make a careful distinction between people who compare Israel's apartheid policies in the West Bank and its imprisonment of Gazans with Nazis and people who compare its merely discriminatory policies against its own Arab minority with the Nazis?

      What does it say about Israel supporters who use Nazi comparisons inappropriately? I gotta read this document--they must have thought of everything.

      I just googled. Here's the link--

      Link

      That document is a mess. Some of what it defines as "antisemitism" is clearly antisemitism while other parts might be, depending on the circumstances, and some of it is little more than a ready-made excuse to label as "anti-semitism" any criticism of Israel that is harsher than some supporter wishes to admit might be valid. The caveat that criticism of Israel that is just like criticism of other countries is too vague to be useful. It is not a good idea to stretch the definition this far, to put it mildly.

    • Donald February 25, 2012 at 12:26 am

      Lib319--Are you endorsing that article at israelmuse or just offering it as some sort of balance to the Lawrence of Cyberia blog article? I hope it was the latter.

      It doesn't really work as balance, though, because it's silly. The gist of Lawrence of Cyberia's point is that to create a Jewish state in Palestine it was necessary to engage in ethnic cleansing and this was morally wrong. If you want to defend Zionism (not the ethnic cleansing, but the right of Jews to move to Palestine) you'd stick closely to the one truly legitimate point, which is that European Jews in the 30's and 40's were in a desperate plight and needed a safe haven. That's undeniable, because people have the right to survive and that includes the right to take refuge wherever they can (though not the right to then drive out the natives for the sake of creating a new state). But that article you linked is frankly childish--it's sort of like a grade school version of patriotism (which many people never outgrow) where one's country is never wrong and its critics are never right, where Israel loves its enemies and really, anyone who thinks there is anything wrong with Israel is either misinformed or evil. Irgun wasn't "terrorist"--their only motives were to save Jews. Sure, and I suppose a Palestinian could argue that Islamic Jihad isn't a terrorist group either using the same sort of logic. It reminds me of some rightwing American writers who feel the need to put out books on American history that set straight all those awful lying liberals who think we might have done a few things in our history about which we should be ashamed.

      I was hoping you'd at least link to an intelligent liberal Zionist. I know of some, but you might be familiar with some I haven't read or heard about.

    • Donald February 24, 2012 at 7:30 pm

      "I’m aware of the EU working definintion of antisemitism that lists drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis."

      I'm not a big fan of making comparisons to the Nazis, but the EU working definition is ludicrous. Nazi comparisons are made all the time, sometimes by people defending Israel, sometimes by people talking about a soup vendor in "Seinfeld". There probably hasn't been an enemy of Israel who wasn't commonly compared to Hitler. It makes the accusation of anti-semitism a joke when it is stretched this far. Or to put it another way, when I hear that someone is accused of anti-semitism, until I hear further details I figure there is about a 50 percent chance that what they did was say harsh things about Israel.

      (Along similar lines, whenever someone criticizes Israel in Great Britain the NYT either states or implies that it is an example of anti-semitism. The most recent example was on their op ed page, in a piece about "The Merchant of Venice".)

      Personally I prefer comparing Israeli policies to either apartheid South Africa or some of the more noxious policies in American history, like our treatment of the Native Americans or Jim Crow in the south. Did the European Union decide that it was anti-semitic to compare apartheid South Africa to Nazi Germany, or the KKK to the Nazis?

    • Donald February 24, 2012 at 5:22 pm

      Oh, as for Plan Dalet, I haven't actually read Pappe. I have read Meron Benvenisti's book "Sacred Landscapes". Benvenisti doesn't think the initial expulsions were intended as ethnic cleansing, but had a military motive--he says that the true process of ethnic cleansing came later in the war, when there were conscious decisions to expel Arabs and keep them out for purely demographic reasons and then after the war when it was decided not to let them return. My own layperson's opinion is that this seems psychologically implausible. I know there were plans for having an Israel with a larger Arab population--this is supposed to show that the Zionist movement didn't intend to drive out the Arabs, but it's perfectly possible that some Zionists favored ethnic cleansing while others did not, and it's also possible for someone who might have preferred the Arabs to live somewhere else to think it wise to have plans for all eventualities. So as for Plan Dalet, it's really hard to believe that the Zionists who planned to drive out the inhabitants of Palestinian villages didn't also think to themselves how convenient it would be if those expelled Arabs could be kept out permanently. Whether they would put that down in writing is another matter.

    • Donald February 24, 2012 at 5:15 pm

      "By the same token do you seriously think the arabs determinedly stepped in as nation states on a war footing because of concern for Palestinian refugees?"

      By and large I tend to think of governments as guilty until proven innocent. There might have been some concern, but humanitarian motives are probably not high on the list of reasons why any government ever goes to war. I think some probably went to war to stop Zionist expansionism and if the opportunity arose, to grab some territory for themselves. King Abdullah's motives were particularly suspect.

      My own stance here is not that there were some noble Arab governments that represented peace and love and justice and brotherhood, but only that the Zionist David against Goliath depiction of what happened in 1948, with little Israel defending itself against Arab nations comprising tens of millions of people is largely a heroic Tolkien-like fantasy concocted to whitewash the sordid process by which Israel actually came into existence. No government comes out of the I/P conflict looking good. The largely innocent victims of all this were the Palestinians ,though again, to be clear, this doesn't mean that every individual Palestinian is or was an innocent victim, as some Palestinians have obviously also committed atrocities.

      It's struck me for decades that the way pro-Israeli Americans talk about 1948 is one-sided to the point of being racist. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are held to be guilty because of the Mufti or for the real or imagined crimes of various Arabs, or they aren't supposed to have the right to live in their own homeland because Jews have longed to return to Israel for centuries, or because of European anti-semitism or because there are so many other Arab countries and so Palestinians should have been willing to move to some other Arab nation and let the Zionists take their land. Just the other day someone wrote a letter to the NYT complaining that Mustafa Barghouti had mentioned Palestinian troubles had begun in 1948--to this person this was a damning indictment, because it meant that Barghouti wasn't acknowledging Israel's right to exist. Ponder the utter self-absorption on display there--Palestinians are actually expected by this sort of Zionist to endorse their own ethnic cleansing and if they don't, it shows bad faith in the minds of this letter writer. That kind of thinking is extremely common among Israel supporters and I think it says something about the ideology that leads people to think this way.

    • Donald February 24, 2012 at 3:47 pm

      Lib319-- Good. Read as much of Lawrence of Cyberia's articles as time and interest allows. Reading her articles is probably a much better way to learn the anti-Zionist point of view than just getting into arguments with people online.

    • Donald February 24, 2012 at 11:43 am

      "Now it’s all very well to trade potshots with people in a blog comment section"

      BTW, my point there is not that you couldn't learn things from reading people here, but that the atmosphere of a blog comment section doesn't really encourage it. Instead there's a tendency to focus on the potshot aspect, to "win" the argument. Also, it's generally considered bad form to write comments that are thousands of words long.

    • Donald February 24, 2012 at 11:36 am

      While you're waiting for Woody, you could be reading this--

      Lawrence of Cyberia post

      It strikes me from reading your comments that the most charitable (albeit unlikely) interpretation one can give to them is that you have somehow managed to miss 90 percent of the Palestinian narrative and have no real sense of just how strong a case can be made against Zionism as it was actually practiced. Now it's all very well to trade potshots with people in a blog comment section, but if you really want to learn what underlies the anti-Zionist pov "Lawrence of Cyberia" is one of the best blogs you could read. She's got a ton of articles listed on the left hand margin (I linked to one from 2008 which seemed relevant here) and if you are genuinely curious I suggest you read some of them. As many as time allows, in fact.

    • Donald February 23, 2012 at 7:12 pm

      "I would be interested in how you think the 48 war wasn’t started by the Arabs and how claiming they did is twisting history to make myself an anti-arab racist atoneing for thousands of years of goy anti-semitism."

      Seriously? Are you one of those people who think that Israel declared its independence in May 1948, only to be met by a coalition of Arab countries with a vastly greater population that tried to strangle the newborn nation? That's how the story line goes, isn't it? It's largely BS, but I just wonder if that's what you think. Because in reality nearly half of the Palestinians were refugees before May 1948, i.e., the Arab armies (outnumbered by Israeli forces under arms) entered the fighting after 300,000 Palestinians had already been turned into refugees and as for who started the shooting between Palestinians and Jews, it's an almost meaningless question, given that there were acts of terror and violence flowing in both directions that long precede 1948.

      I don't think the Palestinian/Arab side is without blame, for the simple reason that there were attacks on Jewish civilians that go back to the 1920's. Those were inexcusable crimes. What disgusts me about your position is that you gloss over Israeli and Zionist crimes against Arab civilians, barely alluding to them at all before hurrying on to blame the "Arabs" for starting the war. But the mere fact that you feel sorry for the Arabs and wish they had better leaders makes you think of yourself as fairminded.

    • Donald February 22, 2012 at 7:24 pm

      "No, why does it follow that the claims of the absolute, unconditional right of all of the Palestinians to return to the homes they left or were made to leave during the 1948 war started by the Arabs are valid?"

      I'm late to this subthread (I didn't realize it was still going on) but as Woody said above, this is Nabka denial. It's morally repulsive, not very different from blaming Jews for the Holocaust on the grounds that some Bolsheviks were Jewish. Lib319 makes numerous other statements that are blatantly racist, though he (she?) seems blissfully unaware of the fact. For instance, there's this--

      "I’m not saying that a cultural claim is a reason to dispossess someone else from their home, rather I’m saying that in cultural terms (and I’m afraid that does indeed include their religion and Diaspora history in Europe or whatever country they ended up in), the Jews have a far greater connection and indeed claim to Israel as their rightful home. The Arabs were given the choice to share, the choice of a state, some stayed, some took money for land and left, some left bidden by other Arab nations and some were indeed forced from their land in the troubles between the peoples including the war started by the Arabs in 48. But where in all this was there a Palestinian entity in any way different from the surrounding Arab peoples that ensures a Palestinian state takes precedence over a Jewish one?"

      In other words, a bunch of Palestinians living in their own homes had no right to continue to live there because there were other Arabs living in nearby lands, some Palestinians were bought out, and anyway, Jewish culture is superior.

      It's every nasty racist argument ever made by a self-styled liberal to rationalize the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. By rights under the new set of rules this does seem banworthy, though maybe one would want to keep this person around so as to demonstrate what this particular brand of liberal Zionism amounts to.

      Incidentally, I wasn't surprised that lib isn't Jewish, because I've heard non-Jewish friends in real life make the same sort of argument. Some non-Jewish liberals think that they can atone for centuries of anti-semitism by becoming anti-Arab racists.

    • Donald February 15, 2012 at 3:07 pm

      Okay, that makes sense.

    • Donald February 15, 2012 at 3:02 pm

      Thanks newclench, but I asked because his post here doesn't really tell me much about what Ezra thinks, except for the claim that there is leftist anti-semitism, something he seems to have concluded that from the Durban conference in 2001 where people apparently claimed that "Zionism is racism". You know the guy and you seem to think that we should all be able to know him as well as you do based on this one post. Well, you're wrong. I'd never heard of him and whether you believe me or not, I found this post almost completely uninformative. If someone talks about "anti-semitism on the left" I want to know exactly what he means. He might very well be right and if he gave some examples of what he meant I might agree with him, but other than the slogan "Zionism is racism" (which is what people have been discussing), he didn't do that.

      I might even agree with Ezra's views, based on your depiction of them. But your one paragraph told me more than his entire post.

      Anyway, thanks for replying.

    • Donald February 15, 2012 at 12:58 pm with 6 replies

      Newclench-- Ezra seems to define anti-Zionism as anti-semitism. As Annie said above, Zionism becomes racist when it gives more rights to Jews to inhabit Palestine than it gives to the Palestinians who were already there, but it's not racist if one is speaking of some hypothetical land without a people for a people without a land. Unfortunately that doesn't describe what actually happened. This is a fairly simple concept to understand, but I can't tell if Ezra acknowledges that it was morally wrong to drive Palestinians off their land in order to establish a Jewish state. Maybe it's all explained on his website, but all we've got here is what he chose to type.

  • A lull on this site
    • Donald February 20, 2012 at 1:57 pm

      Danaa--

      You noticed my non-apology because I wasn't apologizing. I don't usually refer to remarks as barroom BS if I'm apologizing.

      His remark sounded like more than just a Chomsky-style illustration of US double standards on military intervention. It sounded like a call for intervention if BDS didn't work. But in fairness, it's incoherent. The Israelis can't use their nuclear arsenal as a deterrent because they "know" we might blast them without warning with a nuclear submarine, but they don't think we'd do anything against "Jews" so we might have to intervene? Huh?

      What I regret is that I paid the remark any attention whatsoever.

      The value of Mondoweiss is mainly in the front page articles. That's true of almost all blogs. If Phil and Adam have any good effect on the world (and I think they probably have) it'll be from the front page articles. Comment sections are froth. They can be educational froth (MW's is at its best) but that's about it.

    • Donald February 19, 2012 at 11:42 pm

      "though if memory serves there were people who seemed almost hopeful that Israel and Turkey would get into a shooting war after the murder of the protestors, and it seemed like the same sort of craziness at work."

      I should probably spell out what I mean there, but then I'd have to go back and find some examples from 2010 where it seemed like people were hoping Turkey and Israel would get into a war right after Israel murdered the protestors on that ship and I'm not going to do that. Too lazy. But assuming my memory is correct, I think hoping for such a thing was a mistake.

    • Donald February 19, 2012 at 11:15 pm

      “the one whos comments he “misrepresented”–

      Here's the comment that was "misrepresented"–

      “Put trade sanctions on Israel

      That should do it. But if it didn’t do it, and they are delusional enough to believe they can continue their current path, then US military intervention is warranted. If I were an Israeli withdrawing of US support would be enough to put the mother of all fears in me. Just how delusional the zionist government of Israel really is is what disturbs me. Recently we had Slater, as some other zionist have claimed here before, say that it would be a political impossibility the US would ever intervene in Israel and that Israel would be some kind of military match for the US. Both of these beliefs are very naive. Anyone of a certain age or familiar with history has seen countries politically swing from one extreme to another for one thing, meaning no politic policy of any country should ever be taken for granted or as written in stone by anyone.
      I am sure the Israeli government knows that the US could take out Israel with one Boomer precision ballistic missile submarine that is undetectable and would render the Israeli so called Sampson option and nukes irrelevant. But the worry is that they don’t think the US would ever go that far against Jews no matter what they do and therefore push us and/or the world to the point of military force because they ignored all warnings.
      As I have said numerous times, the zionist don’t fear consequences and people of abnormal hubris who don’t, usually push others into having to inflict them.”

      My “misrepresentation”–

      ” A suggestion that Israel be nuked or might be nuked by the US. Completely insane. ”

      My mistake in my post some weeks back was in taking seriously a remark that was just barroom BS. You get those at any blog from time to time and I should have let it go, focusing on other problems, though if memory serves there were people who seemed almost hopeful that Israel and Turkey would get into a shooting war after the murder of the protestors, and it seemed like the same sort of craziness at work. It’s one thing to point out the hypocrisy that governs who the US bombs and who it doesn’t bomb–I’m all in favor of making that sort of point and I’d like to have seen us all piling on Jerome Slater’s defense of Obama on that ground. But sometimes people here seem to go a little further than that. The commentariat here is a little ghetto and it’s not always very healthy.

  • Jewish substitution and the white gaze
    • Donald February 8, 2012 at 9:08 pm

      Delurking momentarily. I didn't watch the 60 minute youtube lecture, but Amy Jill Levine's opinions on how to talk about the I-P conflict are easy to find on the web. Here, for instance, is a pdf file.

      While one should agree with the need to avoid anti-semitic tropes, even a well known concern troll like myself finds her writing problematic. Others who are interested can peruse the link and find examples of dubious assertions put forward under the guise of helping Christians avoid the pitfalls of anti-semitism. (No one who talks about the Arab countries ganging up on Israel in 48 without mentioning Plan Dalet already in progress should be taken seriously.)

      Not that she's wrong about everything. Some of what she points to really should be avoided. But she seems oblivious to the possibility that insensitivity isn't limited to one side here and is something that might be found in a liberal Zionist like herself, possibly even displayed in a post like the one I linked above. What I cynically think is going on is a struggle for the moral high ground--Levine recognizes that the settlement policy has to be reversed and in making this point early on she seems to think she's established that she is Fair and Balanced, while also scoring a point against some imagined reader who was going to assume that all Jews think alike and support Israel no matter what. Gosh, some Israel supporters oppose settlements? Who'd a thunk it? I mean, who besides anyone who's ever read anything about the subject during the past 30 years. But while acknowledging that Israel isn't perfect, she wants to make it perfectly clear to Christians criticizing Israel who should be worried about sensitivity and who gets to lecture others about it. Her piece would be more effective if she didn't mix in her obvious biases with her sensitivity training and if she acknowledged that there's a constant balancing act here--it's easy for concern about sensitivity towards one side to become an excuse for insensitivity about the other.

  • New additions to the Mondoweiss comments policy
    • Donald January 27, 2012 at 11:47 am with 1 replies

      I should say "no personal concern of mine since I'll just be lurking". I probably wouldn't have been so strict if the new rules forbid mentioning bad behavior by early Zionists, but if they eliminate the sheer idiocy of looking for explanations of Nazi behavior in Jewish behavior, that's a step forward.

    • Donald January 27, 2012 at 11:25 am with 3 replies

      Stopping by just for this. Personally, I had no problem with pointing out anti-semitic remarks by early Zionists. The line for me is crossed by people who talk as though Nazi behavior could be explained by Jewish behavior. It's exactly like explaining the actions of a serial killer of women on some insults he might have received or imagined he received from some particular women. At best, this seems badly mistaken--at worst it is misogynistic.

      But anyway, the comment rules of this blog are no concern of mine now. I'll read the front page articles and I've read some of this thread, but that's it.

  • A regular commenter on this site seeks a more temperate comment board
    • Donald January 20, 2012 at 2:13 am

      I'm going to post here and probably quit.

      If I were to rewrite the post, I'd focus on one thing--point 3 (though I think they all have validity). It doesn't criticize people for pointing out that the Zionists didn't do enough to save Jews--it says "Any suggestion that some sort of Jewish writing or behavior created the Nazis. At best this just seems wrong. Perhaps some Jews joined in the almost ubiquitous anti-semitism of Western culture before WWII and said deplorable things. By all means condemn any who did, but it doesn't explain Nazi fanaticism. "

      So there's no criticism of what, say, Hostage writes on this subject. I'm in no position to evaluate what he writes. I don't know enough. Somehow people thought I was criticizing such claims. Nope. Assuming he's right, which is beyond my pay grade, such things should be discussed.

      So what I'd emphasize is the disturbing fact that we did have a poster here in 2009-2011 who said that the Jews did something that turned the Germans into monsters. He called himself an anti-semite. He cited David Irving and denied Irving was a Holocaust denier. And while some of us on the pro-Palestinian side attacked him, others defended him. I supplied one link to him above and another is here--

      link

      I pick this guy out because he was out in the open and should have been a pariah, but try googling his posts and he wasn't. Some of us criticized him and some defended him. Why? He's not the only one either. He's just the most obvious, though I remember another clearcut case. And a few weeks ago someone recommended a Holocaust denial book.

      Most people here aren't anti-semites, but what happens is that there's a tendency not to see it when someone is. It's all part of that blog tribal culture thing we have going on.

      Tree, PG may have tried to walk it back, but that original post in the earlier link was clear as day in showing his callousness. And it's consistent with his other posts.

      This blog is supposed to be about the human rights of Palestinians, but we don't make a convincing set of advocates if some of us leap to defend the views of people like PG.

      And on my point 4--suppose a blog comment section contained a post by someone who said that the question to be asked about a serial killer of women is what the women did to make him a monster? And some people defended that comment? Would one want to go to that blog for a serious discussion of feminism in America?

      Anyway, I think MW is a great blog doing great work, but the comments section doesn't always live up to the ideals we espouse, not by a long shot.

      I'm falling asleep--I was googling various past threads for hours and this final comment is probably getting incoherent. But this has been bugging me for years. And no, it doesn't mean that anti-semitism in the current day kills anywhere near as many people as anti-Arab bigotry. But that's not the point.

    • Donald January 20, 2012 at 1:29 am

      "Donald as this thread goes on I am beginning to conclude that you are disingenuous. I went back and read your link to American and it is very difficult to say that he was advocating nuking Israel."

      I initially regretted putting that comment 1 up there, but now, with so many people defending American's comment, I think it was right.

      My original post said this--

      "A suggestion that Israel be nuked or might be nuked" which I then called insane.

      Then people point out that American was only pointing out why Israel wouldn't retaliate with their nukes if we attacked them. Of course he also says we might attack them someday. Obviously he thinks we stand ready to use our nukes on them if they use theirs. So yeah, this does sound like a suggestion that Israel be nuked or might be nuked. All the elements are there. Advocacy for war with Israel if our interests clash, which American thinks it is naive to rule out. And a willingness to turn them into a glassy parking lot if they even think of using theirs.

      You know, I'm just going to take a wild guess and imagine that if one of the unpopular Zionists here had suggested that America and Iran might go to war and Iran wouldn't dare use a nuclear weapon in response if they acquired one, because we could take out their entire country, people would have objected.
      Why? Isn't it naive to imagine that the US and Iran might have a falling out?
      Aren't there war games for such situations? Isn't it possible? Sure it's possible. So if one of the Mondoweiss Israel supporters repeats American's exact argument in virtually the same words, just replacing "Israel" with "Iran" and "Jew" with "Muslim", not a one of you would object.

    • Donald January 18, 2012 at 8:31 pm

      "For example, I found the discussion that followed the long ago post you linked above from PG fascinating and a good example of openness leading to knowledge and a delineation of what is and is not reasonable, better made openly through discussion, whether heated or not, than simply assumed and self-censored."

      Not that long ago. I think most of us around then are around now. Mid 2010. PG vanished around early 2011.

      Your stance in favor of uncensored thought obviously has merit (though in fact Phil does censor things here) and I'll accept the notion that I'm too quick to want to banish people. But I didn't think that discussion ended where it should have. There should have been general agreement that PG's views were appalling, just as there should be general agreement that the Gaza War was one giant war crime. Richard accuses me of having "litmus tests" and he's right. People should have a consistent standard on human rights and basic decency. That's the litmus test. PG flunked it badly. Which was a shame, because he was a very articulate opponent of a war on Iran, while saying some really despicable things about Jews. And people who in various posts came to PG's defense when he was saying such things also fail.

      And also, it's not like Holocaust denial/revisionism is a dead issue around here. I can't always judge what some people are trying to argue (and can't help wondering if that has something to do with the threat of banning), but occasionally it's clearcut, as when someone gives a book recommendation to a work by a Holocaust denier. Which happened a few weeks ago.

      Maybe the tradeoff for having a pro-Palestinian blog is having people like PG pop up. But I haven't noticed that at other places. I haven't seen Abu AsadKhalil (who refers to Israel as the "Zionist entity") ever show the slightest tolerance for Holocaust deniers or anti-semites.

    • Donald January 18, 2012 at 6:02 pm with 1 replies

      "That charge has been so misused and overused that we should be very hesitant to employ it ourselves"

      In one of my earlier drafts of this post I identified that as the problem. We're so used to the charge of anti-semitism being misused and overused that we are like the villagers in the story of the little boy who cried wolf. In fact, we get angry when the word "anti-semitic" is used, because we've started associating it with attacks on anyone who is pro-Palestinian. I get angry myself when it is misused. I know that has absolutely no credibility in this thread because I'm this or that or the other, but it's true.

      But I think that because of this quite justified suspicion of the term "anti-semitism" people at this blog have overreacted. Somewhere in this thread I linked to a comment from 2010 by a commenter who vanished in early 2011, right about the time he was denying that David Irving was a Holocaust denier. That was 9 months ago. This guy wasn't some closet anti-semite, making comments one found anti-semitic, but didn't say so for fear of triggering a huge thread about how anti-semitism is used to justify murdering Palestinians. This guy gloried in his bad boy claim that he himself was an anti-semite. He doesn't say that particular thing in the link I provided, but it wasn't hard to find. In the link I provided elsewhere he's talking about what the Jews did that caused the Germans to become monsters. Sorry. That's anti-semitic. It goes way beyond the history of whatever Jews did or didn't do in the prewar period--it blames them for making Germans monsters. It's exactly like talking about a rape victim's skimpy attire

      This guy wasn't a pariah here. It's the boy who cried anti-semitism syndrome. Real ones show up and almost no one believes it.

      It's naive to think this blog with its relatively open policies on what people can say and with its subject matter wouldn't attract anti-semites. They can't go too far or they'll be banned (though the person I mentioned went pretty damn far). It attracts anti-Arab bigots still. Why wouldn't it attract the other kind, especially if people are so skittish about using the term anti-semite they don't get called for it?

    • Donald January 18, 2012 at 5:41 pm

      To tree--

      My memory of this is a bit vague, but when I first came here and saw the crazies on both sides (before Phil started throwing out the most egregious, one of whom I still see commenting at a liberal Zionist site, or did, when it was still active) I did think Richard and I would be allies. He made the right sounds about reconciliation. I thought he just needed a bit of nudging to see that Israel's behavior was worse than he admitted. So I nudged. And nudged some more. No motion. At first I was perplexed. Eventually I started getting ticked off.

      None of my post, which I'd rewrite if I had a time machine handy, was meant to say that we shouldn't be harshly critical of Zionism. But I don't think the comment section here is quite so clean and virtuous on the pro-Palestinian side as people imagine. You can get away with saying pretty much anything if you're on the right team--that's how it is at most blogs and this place is no exception. (There are exceptions, but this ain't one of them.) As for vitriol, it's pretty bad in most blog comment sections and partisanship is the norm. It's why I wouldn't really trust any blog comment section I can think of to give a fair look at any subject. Go to some liberal blog, at least the ones I've visited, and you quickly see what the party line is. Or alternatively, there will be two party lines and they regularly rip into each other.

      I'm a big fan of the front page, the blog itself. (Which, btw, isn't going to be seeing any more posts from me. Not that Phil has offered it but even if he did I've got nothing that should go up there. And what I did put up would need a rewrite.)

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