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Total number of comments: 9 (since 2010-03-02 20:58:29)

Richard Congress

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• What forestry teaches us about ethnic cleansing
  • Richard Congress May 20, 2012 at 12:52 pm with 1 replies

    There's an important flaw in the ethnic cleansing comparison between what the European colonists of North America did in the 17th through the 19th centuries and what the Zionist colonizers have been doing since 1947 (or thereabouts, I'm not trying to nail down a fixed starting point ).

    It's about the relationship of forces. The Native inhabitants of this continent never had a chance. Their small numbers were overwhelmed with an unstoppable tidal wave of millions of people coming in from Europe. There were a few stands made by the plains Indians that stunned the U.S. Army, but that was it. Even without the large technological advantage, the sheer powers of numbers sealed the fate of American Indians. The demographics were unbeatable.

    The relationship of forces in Palestine was and is quite different. A well armed minority of Jews, with a lot of help from rich, technologically advanced Western nations was able to establish a state by force and expel most of the larger Palestinian population. But they didn't expel them far enough or wipe them out. Within the area of "Greater Israel" under the control of the Israeli government and military (any difference there?) the populations are about even, with the Palestinians increasing at a higher rate that the Jews (I'm not saying "Israelis" to compare with "Palestinians" because its an empty, meaningless category. In the Jewish State only Jews have the rights that we in the USA would associate with citizenship.)

    So when Zionists laugh and poke fun at people in the USA, saying "Hey! We only did what you guys did...ha ha." They should stop and think about the real difference between the two experiences. Being a tiny minority, the American Indians were crushed as a people and have to this day never recovered. Not so with the Palestinians and their future won't be like that which befell Native Americans.

• Mr. President, Palestine has heard you
  • Richard Congress March 18, 2012 at 5:16 pm with 1 replies

    Phil, you deserve to get beat up (verbally) for making such an insipid comment. Does Obama preach pacifism to the Israeli government...or even restraint? The Palestinians can figure out tactics and strategy for themselves, and learn from experience as well. There is a history of nonviolent struggle for their rights by the Palestinian people (as well as armed resistance). They don't need Obama to clue them in. What has happened is that nearly all of the peaceful protests that have been carried out in occupied Palestine have been ignored or characterized as terrorism by Israel, the US and the media.
    In South Africa the armed struggle was ongoing and an organic part of the overall struggle. Nelson Mandela never disavowed the military wing (which was commanded by Joe Slovo, a South African Jewish communist), rather he embraced it as part of a mix of tactics that ended up working.
    The demands of ML King became all the more compelling when the powerful in this country saw that ghetto rebellions (in its first foray into the riot-torn black ghetto in Detroit, the national guard was driven back by sustained rifle fire) were the fruit of just demands being unmet.
    Obama is the president of the United States, by definition he is a bullshitter who looks out first and foremost for the interests of the rich and powerful.

• The radicalization of Yossi Gurvitz
  • Richard Congress March 10, 2012 at 10:35 am with 1 replies

    re: "Rambam [Maimonides in the 12th century] writes, If a Jew has intercourse with a gentile child three years old and a day, the child should be executed for misleading the Jew, making him sin. Those texts are still valid. We don’t understand them, but they are valid.

    These Jews ... took the elements of the religion that were nationalistic and have been slumbering for 100s of years and awakened it. They took the hatred of mankind which had persisted in Judaism for millennia and gave it voice and force. [In the former rabbinical tradition] the rabbis tried to housetrain Jewish messianism. The old way of thinking was, the messiah will lead Jews to victory. The rabbis made the messiah a supernatural being capable of talking to birds and animals. This mystical being was a dam against Jewish messianism in Ashkenazi Judaism, and the eliminationist elements against Christianity were held down by this teaching.

    But once Israel was created, many Jews saw it as the end of the three oaths, the Shloshet Ha'Shvuot. Two of these oaths enjoin the Jews not to mass-emigrate to Eretz Yisrael and not to provoke the gentiles. The third orders the gentiles not to treat the Jews too badly.

    Now Israel has the right to use force, and every demon that was pushed into the basement is up and has an M16."

    Gurvitz is describing the core, basic element of Judaism. It is an ingrown, reactionary, patriarchal, tribal creed once it's stripped of its 19th to 20th century secular wrappings. Real events in the world have begun to peel back these artificial layers. Will it drag supposed liberalized, progressive Jews along with it? Hopefully the trend toward skepticism at least among young American Jews will continue and deepen.

    I like Dan Crowther's remarks re: Gilad Atzmon. I doubt that the self-appointed group of censors on the left who want to ban him from the Palestine solidarity movement have read anything he's written beyond a few random quotes. These people should also seriously study what Israel Shahak and Schlomo Sand have written.

• Palestinian statehood initiative is educational tactic in a long struggle
  • Richard Congress July 27, 2011 at 11:00 am with 1 replies

    Just to clarify what I think of the bogus 2 state plan of Obama & others, I've reprinted to first part of my post which was edited out.

    "In the article below Illan Pappe argues that establishing a Palestinian mini-state on the 22% of its pre-1948 borders that the Gaza strip and the West Bank represent is no solution. He's obviously right. But does that mean the campaign to get individual countries to recognize a Palestinian State and have the UN vote to recognize such a state is wrong?

    In reality, no one really believes that if the UN were to recognize the West Bank and Gaza as a Palestinian state anything would come of it. It's abundantly clear that the Israeli government and the White House's definition of such a state has no qualities of statehood known to humankind.

    When Obama, or Netanyahu (only under duress, through clenched teeth) say "OK, let's have two states," they mean a very strong Israeli Jewish State which controls an unarmed, dependent, Palestinian prison camp with a flag and national anthem.

    Israel doesn't even want that phoney solution to happen and Obama is just mouthing the words in order not to look like a totally abject apologist for every crime Israel commits. In the long run (or maybe not so long run) Israel want to push all Palestinians out of Israel proper, Gaza and the West Bank..at a minimum (Likud and Israel Betainu are direct heirs to Ze'ev Jabotinsky's Revisionist Zionists who made claims to Egypt's Sinai and the East Bank of the Jordan).

    The campaign for the recognition of a Palestinian state is symbolic. But it serves to put Israel/US on the spot to put up or shut up. It exposes their hypocrisy of opposing any proposal for something that they say they are for, and it exposes and publicizes the ridiculous conditions they put on such a so-called state (no army, no control of their own airspace and borders, the right of Israel to keep troops there, etc). It also puts the lie to the Israel/US claim that the “negotiation process” must be the way to go.
    Israel won't even slow down the illegal building of colonies in the West Bank, let alone stop them. All the concessions have to be on the Palestinian side; Israel concedes nothing; it just continues to take.

    In so many words, the campaign for the UN to vote for a Palestinian state in September is an educational campaign and serves to rally those who favor Palestinian human rights and oppose Israeli oppression and ethnic cleansing. That's a good thing. Besides, this is one tactic in a very long, hard struggle."

    --Rick Congress

• Can you say Amy Winehouse and Norwegian massacre in the same breath?
  • Richard Congress July 27, 2011 at 11:08 am

    Amy Winehouse was a great, blues-based singer. From a couple of years ago when I first downloaded some of her music (legally) till now I never thought of her as Jewish. She was one of my people: humans.

• Nonviolence and the struggle for Palestinian-Israeli equality
  • Richard Congress July 8, 2010 at 9:29 am with 1 replies

    “The entire world, especially Europe and Russia, must give Israelis and the Jewish people some sort of of ultimate, clear, final, and comprehensive apology for centuries of persecution, and some kind of collective assurance of ‘Never again’”! [Matthew Taylor]
    There have been apologies ad infinitum for the Holocaust for decades. Misplaced reparations from Germany to Israel in the billions, on and on. It's been converted to a world wide cult of philo-semitism.
    And the Zionists will never be satisfied. They love everyone cringing and apologizing forever. They love it. And there will be no end of disgusting schmucks like Dershowitz, Netanyahu, Schumer, Weisel etc. demanding more apologies. It gives them permanent moral superiority and a cover for Israel to commit any crime tit can get away with. The Holocaust is three generations in the past, but it STILL serves a useful purpose to justify Israeli ethnic cleansing.

    Neither the Palestinian people, nor the Arabs (and Turks) as a whole own the Jews any apology for the atrocities of the Europeans.
    Where did the Jews expelled from Spain go to? They went to the protection of the Ottoman Empire.

    Enough already with this harping on the world's guilt for the Holocaust. Other people have suffered ethnic/racial/religious oppression and campaigns of extermination.

    Apologists for Zionism's reactionary, and intrinsic impulse towards expulsion and (if they can get away with it) extermination of Palestinians will never stop invoking the Holocaust. Waving the bloody shirt of victimization has been their trump card in trying to silence any criticism of Israel.

    Those Jews who belong to a synagogue or other Jewish organizations have been brain washed with the story of the history of the world centering around Jewish victimhood. And they have been taught a contempt for any other people who also claim to have been oppressed, and they have been taught paranoia and racist hatred against Islam and all Arabs. They have to unlearn this poisonous propaganda.
    When I had to got to temple (after my bar-mitzvah I was free) there was none of this going on. When I returned to the same temple (in Indianapolis) decades later for one of my nephew's bar-mitzvah I was stunned to see a big "Holocaust Resource Center" had been built on and that the whole synagogue and service had been radicalized with crude, full-throated Israeli nationalism.

    FORGET ABOUT APOLOGIES. TIME TO DEMAND THAT ORGANIZED JEWRY RESPECT HUMAN RIGHTS.

  • Richard Congress July 7, 2010 at 7:07 am

    Non Violence as a principle is a metaphysical, philosophically idealist (idealist in the sense of non-materialist) form of religious belief. It begins from unprovable (or untestable in the real world) dogmas and then filters what ever happens in the world through this lens..it dismisses anything that doesn't support its unprovable first principles. That is to say it's a scam, like all religions and many secular ideologies.
    Was Ghandi a Ghandist? Marx, irritated at the antics of some of his followers, said "I am not a Marxist." The tactics, strategies, end goals, etc. have to be evaluated in this world and this life. Pacifism can't do this because it is other worldly and takes as good coin unprovable (or it cannot be empirically tested). It's like a biologist arguing with a creationist.

  • Richard Congress July 6, 2010 at 9:01 pm

    Matthew Taylor's posting/ running argument for his brand of nonviolence against activists who disagree with him, and who also happen to live in the real world, are really, really awful.
    He is putting forth a holier than thou bunch of mystical drivel that is a CANCER on oppressed peoples' struggles for liberation.
    Do I sound too harsh? Am I too dismissive of the, to paraphrase, the years of alleged scholarship on Ghandi and nonviolence? No not at all.
    Why do I say it is a cancer? Because it is a utopian, debilitating doctrine that always gives the benefit of the doubt to the oppressors and denigrates those who fight back for their rights. Usurpers always like to state that they are defending law and order and that any insurgency is illegitimate unless it is properly "peaceful."
    How many times have we heard pro-zionist defenders of Israeli state terrorism ask in dismay, "where is the Palestinian Ghandi?" They are violence-baiting any opposition to Israeli violence. It looks like the pacifists in our movement are acting like a fifth column. (is this too incendiary? I'm very, very pissed off and have had it with haughty lectures from "principled pacifists.")
    The criticisms of the passengers on the Mavi Marmara who were under murderous armed attack by a remorseless IDF commando unit are nauseating. Taylor would have them wearing saffron robes and chanting OMMMM, or something. The use of Hindu religious jargon to criticize the vetting of the passengers is more evidence of the fantasy-land nature of this kind of church dogma style pacifism.
    There has never been a successful major social change or victory of the downtrodden scored via any so-called principled philosophy of non-violence. Not in India where there was an armed movement. Look at India now, it's a disaster of poverty and theft of land from destitute peasants. (see Ahrundati Roy's article "talking with the comrades" about the armed resistance of these peasants--resistance which is the only thing keeping them from losing everything.)
    The civil rights movement in the US used very practical tactics of mass mobilizations and passive resistance. This fitted both the goal and political environment. The goal was not socialist revolution to turn society upside down. It was to eradicate Jim Crow, to win formal democratic equal rights. that goal was won, by and large. Of course any democratic right has to be constantly defended as we have seen with the Nixon Southern Strategy beginning in 1968 in which these gains have been chipped away, along with other things like labor rights, and checks on corporate power.
    A big factor in the civil right struggle was the popularity of Malcom X and the later ghetto rebellions. These were not planned acts of violence; they were uprisings provoked by police sadism and wanton brutality. They played a constructive role in gaining social programs. The government had to respond in some way, and not with more force.
    Taylor should look up the history of the Deacons for Defense in the south. They stopped KKK raids into black neighborhoods by showing up with shotguns and rifles to protect civil rights leaders who were threatened with attacks by the Klan on their homes. The Deacons were not the only such group during that period. They also played a constructive role in the movement. I doubt that anyone in their neighborhood berated them for not understanding Hindu teachings on nonviolence.
    Finally, there is the issue of winning over the Israeli people...I suppose by not scaring them too much. I'm not going to say much about that. It's just another example of the oh so moralistic pacifists catering to the oppressor (and yes, most of the Israeli Jews are the oppressors. Can they be persuaded? Don't count on it. And don't base all of your plans for the Palestinian struggle for their rights on pleasing the colonizers.

• 'This is New York. This is the moment' (IDF benefit dinner)
  • Richard Congress March 3, 2010 at 5:22 pm

    Besides the 5pm silent march against the Friends of the IDF dinner, there is another demonstration Mondoweiss readers should know about. There is a protest rally in front of the Waldorf Astoria at 6pm which will have a sound system. It's organized by Al Awda a Palestinian led organization. So don't slight one action for the other. One could actually participate in both.

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