Commenter Profile

Total number of comments: 6 (since 2009-11-26 20:27:34)

Peter Marmorek

fellow traveller, editor of Tikkunista!

Website: http://www.tikkunista.com

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  • An appeal to Arabic-speakers
  • Al Gore, Donald Graham, and David Ignatius signed letter flogging Marty Peretz fund
    • Peter Marmorek October 5, 2010 at 4:23 pm

      and some good news....

      Settlers on Tuesday gave new copies of the Koran to Palestinians in a West Bank village whose mosque was burned in an attack blamed by Palestinians on settlers....

      "This visit is to say that although there are people who oppose peace, he who opposes peace is opposed to God," said Rabbi Menachem Froman, a well-known peace activist and one of a handful of settlers who went to Beit Fajjar to show solidarity with their Muslim neighbors.

      link to haaretz.com

  • Notes on my racism, part 3: 'My people'
    • Peter Marmorek October 2, 2010 at 9:56 am with 6 replies

      A wonderful piece, Philip: honest, open, and compassionate, both towards yourself and towards others. I suspect some people won't like it because you aren't the person they would like you to be, but that is their problem really.

      I share some of your perspectives (parents German/Austrian Jews) though modified by having people of all (and no) religions in my family. For years I would define myself as not Jewish, because I didn't believe in the theology, but eventually I admitted how much of the ethic defined who I am.

      Thank you for this

  • Israel's government by chaos
  • Jews with guns
    • Peter Marmorek October 2, 2010 at 10:03 am

      As Irving Layton, the Canadian poet wrote:

      TO MY TWO SONS MAX AND DAVID

      The wandering Jew: the suffering Jew
      The despoiled Jew: the beaten Jew
      The Jew to burn: the Jew to gas
      The Jew to humiliate
      The cultured Jew: the sensitized exile gentiles with literary ambitions aspire to be
      The alienated Jew cultivating his alienation like a rare flower: no gentile garden is
      complete without one of these bleeding hisbisci
      The Jew who sends Christian and Moslem theologians back to their seminaries and
      mosques for new arguments on the nature of the Divine Mercy
      The Jew old and sagacious whom all speak well of: when not lusting for his
      passionate darkeyed daughters
      The Jew whose helplessness stirs the heart and conscience of the Christian like the
      beggars outside his churches
      The Jew who can be justifiably murdered because he is rich
      The Jew who can be justifiably murdered because he is poor
      The Jew whose plight engenders profound selfsearchings in certain philosophical
      gentlemen who cherish him to the degree he inspires their shattering aperçus
      into the quality of modern civilization their noble and eloquent thoughts on
      scapegoatism and unmerited agony
      The Jew who agitates the educated gentile making him pace back and forth in his
      spacious wellaired library
      The Jew who fills the authentic Christian with loathing for himself and his fellow
      Christians
      The Jew no one can live with: he has seen to many conquerors come and vanish
      the destruction of too many empires
      The Jew in whose eyes can be read the doom of nations even when he averts his
      eyes in disgust
      The Jew every Christian hates having shattered his selfesteem and planted the
      seeds of doubt in his soul
      The Jew everyone seeks to destroy having instilled selfderision in the heathen
      Be none of these my sons
      My sons be none of these
      Be gunners in the Israeli Air Force

  • Elvis Costello cancels Israel concerts: sometimes it's 'impossible to simply look the other way'
    • Peter Marmorek May 18, 2010 at 5:20 am

      I admire Costello's stand (and his music), but I don't think that BDS is a morally simple issue, as many of the posters seem to be asserting. Chomsky commented in Haaretz yesterday, "I was against a boycott of apartheid South Africa as well. If we are going to boycott, why not the United States, whose record is even worse? I'm in favor of boycotting American companies which collaborate with the occupation," he said. "But if we are to boycott Tel Aviv University, why not MIT?"

      I remember when Paul Simon was being castigated for using South African musicians and recording parts of "Graceland" in South Africa; these days that looks like a move that helped rather than hurt.

      The reduction of complex issues to simple binary positions is rarely a useful tool. Thee are places for disagreeing with Atwood's statement, but to term someone who has struggled as long, as hard, and as nobly for human rights as she has as a "hypocritical phony"[sic] only leaves the commentator looking a jejune naïf.

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