Commenter Profile

Total number of comments: 38 (since 2011-05-05 20:43:27)

kamanja

Retired, living in Israel.

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  • The Palestine National Orchestra: a view from the violin section
    • kamanja April 2, 2012 at 4:25 am

      eGuard, Barenboim's 3 wishes, from the Guardian link you gave:

      "The first is for the Israeli government to realise once and for all that the Middle East conflict cannot be solved by military means. The second is for Hamas to realise that its interests are not served by violence, and Israel is here to stay. And the third is for the world to acknowledge that this conflict is unlike any other in history. It is uniquely intricate and sensitive - a conflict between two peoples who are both deeply convinced of their right to live on the same very small piece of land. This is why neither diplomacy nor military action can resolve this conflict."

      I can see that number three would warrant discussion, but what is so peaceless about the first two?

      A link for you that contains Barenboim's Listen Before it's Too Late in the New York Review of Books a few weeks later link to nybooks.com
      . Take a look at the list of people who supported it, that includes the likes of Alaa El Aswany, not particularly renowned for their Zionism.
      And brief discussion of it link to jeremiahhaber.com

      You question the importance of a peace concert in Gaza. I would have thought that was obvious. Hamas allowed it to happen. It was Israel they were afraid wouldn't, which is why it was kept under wraps until the last minute.

      Back to that New Year (celebrated both in the west and in the east) message you posted, were those the only objectionable quotes you could find?

    • kamanja April 2, 2012 at 3:48 am

      Your words, Walid:
      "Working at cross-current with the PNO, the PYO and other Said Foundation cultral groups, there’s the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra initially set up by Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim although today the Said Foundation is no longer associated with it for good reason."

      Since you've waved it away with a cock-and-bull cadenza, I'll repeat the apparently intentionally dishonest part of your sentence: "there’s the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra initially set up by Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim although today the Said Foundation is no longer associated with it".

      And now to the bum notes, one by one: "although today the Said Foundation is no longer associated with it".

      Mariam Said has explained in detail her differences with the boycott people who started the defamation. You are again invited to read the links I posted and retract.

    • kamanja April 1, 2012 at 4:17 pm with 3 replies

      Complete nonsense.

      Edward Said's widow Mariam Said, Electronic Intifada, March 2010:
      link to electronicintifada.net

      "On 28 January 2010 the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) issued a statement to the Qatari government calling for a boycott of Daniel Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra (WEDO) and condemning the Qatari Ministry of Culture for hosting the orchestra in Doha. The statement goes so far as to accuse Daniel Barenboim of being an ardent Zionist. I would like to point out that the PACBI policy is “to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel.” It does not call for a boycott against all Israelis, but those affiliated with institutions that support the Israeli state and its policies and who do not express support for the Palestinian struggle against occupation. Daniel Barenboim and WEDO do not meet any of those criteria."

      WEDO is but one of the many educational programs of the Barenboim-Said Foundation (BSF) which was founded by Daniel Barenboim together with my late husband, Edward Said. It is registered in Spain and the regional government of Andalusia is the main partner in this project.
      WEDO is not a project for normalization. The yearly workshops in Spain are advanced musical summer courses. When students from Arab countries and Israel attend the same courses at any university around the world where the professor’s competence is the reason for which they enroll, it is considered furthering their education, not normalization.
      The only requirement to attend the workshop and become a member of the orchestra is musical competence and talent. The musicians have to pass rigorous auditions and the ultimate goal is musical education on the highest level. The BSF has been offering music education programs in the occupied West Bank in partnership with the al-Kamandjati Music Center. We are actively supporting the AM Qattan Foundation’s Music Center in Gaza, as well as pioneering projects in the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. We also offer music education programs for Palestinians in the Galilee (we have a conservatory in Nazareth) and in Jaffa. The aim is to bring together all the Palestinians in Palestine through the language of music.
      Most importantly, nowhere in PACBI statement is it mentioned that the WEDO was established by Edward Said as well as Daniel Barenboim.
      By attacking the orchestra, PACBI is attacking the integrity of my late husband and his legacy. It is not the first time PACBI has used this skewed approach. The deliberate omission in the statement of any reference to Edward and his support for this project is a manipulation of the media and a conscious effort to mislead the Palestinian people. Edward passed away more than six years ago. I do not know what he would have said about all this today, but I know how he felt about this project and what he wrote about it. A couple of weeks before his death, when a Palestinian activist friend who had reservations about the project asked him about WEDO, Edward unhesitatingly replied in an email: “It is the most important thing I did in my life.”"

      You're invited to read on and then to retract your libelous claim.

      To prove that nothing has changed since then, a clip of Mariam Said talking about the orchestra last summer:
      link to vimeo.com
      and the West East Diwan Orchestra website announcing auditions for 2012: link to barenboim-said.org

  • The Toulouse killings and the false specter of European anti-Semitism
    • kamanja March 31, 2012 at 2:49 am

      "this seemed to me to indicate the impact is not negligible but a predominant feature"
      Annie, "not negligible" doesn't equal predominant, no way. What I meant is that it's out there too, a reality among other realities to be considered. So yes, you did misunderstand me.

    • kamanja March 31, 2012 at 2:31 am

      My point was not whether these people should be locked up or not, it is whether the views of pro-Palestinians like these, some of whom have been to the region on lecture tours and acclaimed, should be associated with the Palestinian struggle. Whether "without Jews there is no Zionism" is likely to be helpful or harmful, a focus or a damaging distraction. Racism is not a false specter. Not in Europe, not anywhere.

    • kamanja March 30, 2012 at 3:10 pm

      That's too convoluted, Annie. I don't understand what you're trying to say but I accept your apology and I apologize if I offended anyone.

    • kamanja March 30, 2012 at 2:51 pm

      His first name is Robert, Annie.

    • kamanja March 30, 2012 at 1:56 pm

      Will Faurisson do you, American? I don't want to dignify any more of the well-known ones.

    • kamanja March 30, 2012 at 12:59 pm

      Annie, I'm not American. You are talking about American access. Actually we're both talking at cross-purposes. Toulouse is in Europe.

    • kamanja March 30, 2012 at 12:56 pm

      Fake friends was not my expression and pointing out something that is there but not always included in the picture is not a fixation. If I have a fixation it is the serial abuse of a defenseless population, not "the movement" whatever that is. Even so, I never claimed that was fake either. Check it out.

      I posted a link to Anne Karpf's article in response to the "false specter" claim in the title of the piece we're commenting on: the Toulouse killings. She described most of the picture, I added something she didn't say because it has crossed my path.

      Phil Weiss, today, on the subject of Beinart: "I've spent enough time moderating comments at this site to know that such explorations can give rise to vicious anti-Semitism. " link to mondoweiss.net

      Why, in order to utterly condemn the Israeli government's scaremongering, the purpose of which is to panic as many Jews as possible into emigrating to Israel for demographic purposes, does one have to pretend (fake) that Jew-hatred is negligible, a "false specter"? It isn't.

    • kamanja March 30, 2012 at 11:28 am

      "The difference between the fake friends of Israel and the fake friend of Palestinians is purely cosmetic"
      Absolutely, Laurent.

    • kamanja March 30, 2012 at 11:25 am

      I wasn't trying to impress anyone, Annie, or to sell myself as a poet. It was an attempt to say things as they are instead of dressing them up in their usual anti and phobe uniforms.

    • kamanja March 30, 2012 at 10:57 am

      And people here are pathetic in their predictability Annie. The equivalent of the old reds under the bed. I'm neither a he nor a hasbaroonie. It's my explanation for why the world isn't outraged by what is happening to Palestinians in Israel and the OT. Please supply a better alternative if you have one. I'll be happy to cede the argument.

    • kamanja March 30, 2012 at 10:52 am

      "The “segment of Jew-haters” of old is negligible." - Klaus Boemker

      1) They still manage to make a buck in some parts of the world on that ticket.
      2) In Europe they aren't particularly negligible.

      That is not to say there's a danger of genocide, only that they are there and for the moment some of them have hatred of Muslims and people of color as a distraction and profess therefore to be judophiles while others are faithful their hatred of Jews and sometimes profess to be Palestinianophiles.

      Re Germany, I agree, but it's only natural given the circumstances. Germany fears itself. Incidentally, people often forget that the Jews of North Africa, many of whom live in Israel and France, lived precariously under a Vichy government during WWII, even though most of them are, as you say, not WWII refugees.

    • kamanja March 30, 2012 at 10:31 am

      Garaudy and Faurisson worship, to name but a couple. Not in the mood for giving any more of them publicity, but some swallow it lock stock and barrel.

    • kamanja March 30, 2012 at 9:15 am with 37 replies

      This is further complicated by the segment of Jew-haters that plights its troth with the Palestinian struggle. For that exists too. It would be less of a cause for concern if certain ME supporters of the Palestinian struggle as well as some Palestinians themselves did not sometimes allow such theories to fuel anger with Israel (which is justified without needing to resort to frills) which then taint and hamstring the Palestinian struggle in the eyes of the world.

    • kamanja March 30, 2012 at 4:49 am

      It's not that virulent anti-Jewish sentiment doesn't exist in Europe (it does, it always has, European governments themselves admit it, ignorant attempts to minimize it only help cloud the picture) so much as Israel's use of it to justify its calls for Europe's Jews to come to Israel freely and makes that possible by infringing Palestinian rights - to put it mildly. Plus the fact that it does so by courting the very societal elements where anti-semitism, Jew-hatred, call it what you will, is traditionally found, to direct it against Muslim immigrants. Anne Karpf pointed out how mutually beneficial this is, as well as how dangerous, in a CIF piece earlier this week:

      "On Saturday, in the Danish city of Aarhus, a Europe-wide rally organised by the English Defence League will try to set up a European anti-Muslim movement. For Europe's far-right parties the rally, coming so soon after the murders in south-west France by a self-professed al-Qaida-following Muslim, marks a moment rich with potential political capital.
      Yet it's also a delicate one, especially for Marine Le Pen. Well before the killings, Le Pen was assiduously courting Jews, even while her father and founder of the National Front, Jean-Marie Le Pen, was last month convicted of contesting crimes against humanity for saying that the Nazi occupation of France "wasn't particularly inhumane"."

      Karpf goes on to look at the rise of similar parties in other parts of Europe, all of which suddenly see Jews as European because the electorate is currently more panicked by Muslim immigration.

      "Indeed you can blithely sign up to both antisemitism and philozionism. Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik described himself as "pro-Zionist" while claiming that Europe has a "considerable Jewish problem"; he saw himself as simultaneously anti-Nazi and pro-monoculturalism. The British National party's Nick Griffin once called the Holocaust the "Holohoax", subsequently supported Israel in its war "against the terrorists", but the day after the Oslo murders tweeted disparagingly that Breivik was a "Zionist"."

      Read Europe's Racists are not Discerning @ link to guardian.co.uk
      (The ME's racists are no more discerning, btw.)

  • Hasbarapocalypse at Ynet: 'Zionism will only cease being demonized when the West stops demonizing colonialism'
    • kamanja March 7, 2012 at 2:23 am

      Lighten up, people, forget the paeans to colonialism. If someone on Ynet claims that anti-semitism can be cured by showing movies about the holocaust - and at this time of year en plus ...

  • ADL enlists city of Oakland to block Atzmon event
    • kamanja February 29, 2012 at 6:06 am with 2 replies

      Excellent post, Danaa, one caveat:
      “all goys are anti-semitic at heart, and cannot be trusted. They resent us Jews because we are so superior”
      is not a Jewish viewpoint, as you yourself point out in your post-script, although you substitute the word ideology and then qualify even that.

      The education system that avowed center-left, tolerant, westernized Labor-led governments installed during their heyday will provide interesting material for study one day.

  • Etgar Keret in the 'NY Times Magazine' tries on orientalism with an iconic 'Arab' look
    • kamanja February 27, 2012 at 4:05 pm with 2 replies

      urihoresh, being Polish did have a stigma. Jews from there called it the biggest Jewish graveyard in the world and who wants to call themselves the living dead? Also, it must have been difficult for his generation to call some parts of what was Poland Poland because they changed hands so many times. Hungary, Germany, Russia, Ukraine,... it gets pretty muddling. Nothing to do with white man's problem.

      It's sad that people can't read authors without allowing them to tell a story in the kind of language the kind of characters they have invented would use. This reviewer expected Keret to write a pc lecture rather than a story?

  • In Jerusalem, the Nakba is a fresh memory
    • kamanja February 20, 2012 at 10:38 am

      Right, Turgeman House has a nice line in pockmarks to show for it. The Mandelbaum Gate was the only crossing between West and East Jerusalem - for tourists and diplomats rather than residents. Turgeman means translator/interpreter, in Aramaic originally. But it's also used in Arabic and Hebrew. Neat name, I always think, for a house that served as a Jerusalem border crossing.

    • kamanja February 19, 2012 at 4:16 pm

      "Equally weird, the windows of the upper floors on the right & left seem to be partially bricked up, with just wide ‘slots’ – some wider than the original opening – left. It’s a bit decrepit. Maybe somebody fancied himself a diy expert?"

      It was a military position on the Mandelbaum Gate until 1967. The DIY was adjustments for gun slits and the like.

  • BDS interview fallout: Finkelstein 'showed his own fear of the paradigm shift in discourse on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict'
    • kamanja February 21, 2012 at 9:35 am

      "Do you know how stupid it sounds when you say there was no Arab State established in Palestine? "
      Being stupid doesn't bother me as much as it seems to bother you, Hostage. I didn't say no Arab state was established I said the other state was not established, take a look. I meant a state called Palestine (that would, naturally, defend the interests of the Palestinians). I'd be a lot cleverer if people who presumed to enlighten me didn't use fools to piggy-back their pet tirades on. And you must be making the Jordan-is-Palestine brigade mighty happy. In that case, now please explain why Hussein relinquished his claim on the West Bank and its population.

    • kamanja February 20, 2012 at 2:39 am

      Hasbara myths notwithstanding, the other state, i.e. Palestine, did not exist at the time Israel became a state. One of my sources for this not very controversial contention was Rashid Khalidi's The Iron Cage chapters "A Failure of Leadership" and "The Revolt, 1948 and Afterwards".

    • kamanja February 18, 2012 at 3:36 am

      Untrue. The other state did not exist at the time Israel became a state and in a sense turned down its opportunity to become a state at the time, thanks in part to some bad counsel from those who promised to fight on its behalf. No need to tell me why, but those are the bald facts.

  • Cooking magazines dish on new trend: labeling Arabic food Israeli!
  • BDS update: Rage in Israel as BNP Paribas is pressured to pull out
    • kamanja November 26, 2011 at 10:14 am with 1 replies

      "This is the first case in years of a foreign bank leaving Israel. BNP Paribas has had operations in Israel since 2003. "

      Well, it isn't actually. This happened in spring 2011:

      "Dexia is leaving Israel as part of its streamlining measures caused by the financial crisis and a refocus on its core countries, which do not include Israel. The French and Belgian governments nationalized Dexia in 2008 after it verged on bankruptcy. Another reason for the sale of Dexia Israel is lobbying in Belgium to divest from Israel by pro-Palestinian groups."

      Haaretz's Motti Basok evidently doesn't read Globes. link to globes.co.il

  • 'Segregated country': Israel envisions Orthodox-Jewish-only 'cities' in Palestinian area
    • kamanja November 22, 2011 at 5:15 am

      Careful. The ultra-orthodox in the West Bank do not necessarily terrorize Palestinians, ultra-orthodox is not the same as haredi-nationalist. The secular are just as likely to terrorize them, viz articles posted here such as last month's Anatot-Anata "pogrom" against Palestinian and Jewish activists.

      "Second, and even more important in my view, is the fact that the Anatot settlers are mainly secular, quite ordinary Israelis, whatever the latter term might mean. Many, including some present at the attacks just described, serve in the police. I meet them in classes at the Hebrew University; they see themselves as living in a northern suburb of Jerusalem and, no doubt, as part of the Israeli mainstream and the so-called “consensus” about the political future of the country. Some of these same ordinary citizens turned out to be capable of being transformed, within minutes, into what Elias Canetti called a “pack”—a rampaging, bloodthirsty mob that knows no limits."
      link to nybooks.com

    • kamanja November 22, 2011 at 4:51 am

      Ah, you're a stranger to the laws of purity patm? Impregnating the wife only occupies two weeks per month max. Plenty of time left over for study and at least a part-time job.

  • Q: Should Palestinians be able to ride Israeli buses? A: No, it's a Jewish state.
    • kamanja November 17, 2011 at 6:52 am

      She isn't necessarily, but you must be. Zionism and treating people fairly do not have to be antithetical, but it's such a tired and tiring discussion to get into.

    • kamanja November 17, 2011 at 6:39 am

      63 years in a country (that came to them without asking), 45 years as citizens (thanks to the end of military government for their "sector") until they get a bus service? I wouldn't wish to be treated like that, ruthie, would you?

  • Six Palestinian Freedom Riders arrested traveling on Israeli-only bus
    • kamanja November 15, 2011 at 3:31 pm

      Buses in Israel are not, apart from haredi mehadrin lines buses, segregated. Buses in the West Bank aren't either - if they were the Palestinians who boarded them today would have been barred entry on the spot. There the segregation is effected by checkpoints and random checks that prevent Palestinians from getting to destinations Israel wishes to keep them from.

  • Israel's threat to attack Iran-- will Obama capitulate to that as well?
  • '48 is beginning to replace '67 in discourse -- even at UVa
    • kamanja November 8, 2011 at 6:11 am

      Yes, discourse, David Samel is right. It might be a novelty in the States, but here in Israel organizations like Zochrot and their adherents as well as certain university professors and their students have been discussing 1948 for a while now. There's an exhibition and a series of seminars called “Toward the return of Palestinian refugees”
      link to zochrot.org
      currently ongoing at a Tel Aviv venue not five minutes' walk from where Rabin was murdered.

  • Brooklyn-Jenin: Happy Birthday, Juliano Mer Khamis
    • kamanja May 15, 2011 at 3:46 am

      Tears and joy to learn from this stunning tribute, on this day, that in spite of a blow that would have scuppered a lesser project, Jenin's Freedom Theater troupe stands tall, proud and resolved to reassemble that cultural bomb.

  • The invisible blacklist: Why does MOMA exhibit of Francis Alys's work not feature his Jerusalem piece?

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