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Heaven On Earth
The Contempt of the “Right-Thinking” Peacock Rhinos: J-Street goes after Wiesel.
HT/David Winick
Elie Wiesel published a major ad, “For Jerusalem,” in several US newspapers, prompting President Obama to meet hastily with him and reassure him that he understands the importance of Jerusalem to the Jews. Jeremy Ben-Ami of J-Street responded with his own ad featuring a counter-attack by Yossi Sarid, one of the unrepentant architects of the Oslo process, that dismissed Weisel as misinformed, misled, deceived, and, worst of all, “imbuing our current conflict with messianic hues.”
This last accusation is particularly significant. Any religious affection for Jerusalem on the part of Jews appears on J-Street’s radar as messianic attachment, and since, by J-Street’s analysis, compromise on Jerusalem is a sine qua non of achieving peace, such feelings are impediments to reaching a “rational” solution.
Now one of my greater gripes with J-Street concerns the inconsistency with which they apply their principle that pressure should be put “on both sides.” When in doubt, their motto seems to run, squeeze Israel. I am open to correction, but I am unaware of one formal position that they have taken in which Palestinian concessions are the principle target of their actions or declamations.
So here, the fact that the Muslim claim to Jerusalem is not only historically weak, but filled with messianic overtones, indeed Jihadi messianic ones, at the core of an unrestrained apocalyptic struggle, has no bearing for him.
Only the Jews should be restrained from messianic urgings; indeed they should restrain their messianic yearnings to make room for those of the Muslims. Then we’ll have peace.
Barry Rubin, in a brilliant study of Assimilation and its Discontents, pointed out how Jews, eager to succeed in the modern world, found their talent for self-denial one of their most valuable tools, and, for example, would champion any people’s liberation cause but that of their own people. J-Street steps right into the mold, and in so doing, reveals just what levels of contempt it feels for anyone whose sensibility gets in the way of their own sure-fire recipe for peace.
And what if… what if such a strategy of self-denial and sacrifice for the sake of peace ends up backfiring? The fact that J-Street would have Israel carve up its capital to make Palestinians happy, without any attention to the religious stakes for Palestinians, speaks eloquently for a perspective I think as cruel to Jews as it is unwise.
For J-Street, Palestinians need not compromise on Jerusalem as their “capital,” despite the fact that when it lay in Arab hands, Palestinians showed no interest in making it their capital. It matters not that their attachment is part and parcel of a violent and irredentist demand for Palestine from the “river to the sea” for both Fatah and Hamas. It matters not that, in their demand for control of the sacred precincts of their “third most holy city,” Muslims treat Jewish claims with dismissive contempt.
Question for Jeremy and Yossi Sarid, and all the other believers that unilateral compromise will bring peace: What if Israel’s agreement to share Jerusalem, pressured by the Obama administration, produces the opposite effect on Palestinians? What if, rather than empower the moderates to produce matching Palestinian concessions, as you seem to fervently believe, it strengthens the position of the irredentists who argue “East Jerusalem today, Palestine from the River to the Sea” tomorrow?
J-Street: Is there a plan B here?
RL,
Please rise and defend yourself before the public court of the accusation of bad faith.
You may remain silent, of course.
With all due etc.,
Chief Prosecutor for
Peacock Now!™
Jews have been the absolute majority of the Jerusalem population since the mid-19th century [at least since 1853; see Cesar Famin]. The Muslims were a minority throughout the 19th century, and most likely long before it since the Christians and Jews together made up the majority. Jews became the largest single ethno-religious group in the city’s population in 1839 after the Safed earthquake of 1838 drove many Jews out of Safed to Jerusalem.
As to Muslim tolerance here in Jerusalem, there was a Muslim pogrom against Jews in 1834 at the beginning of the pro-Ottoman Arab-Muslim revolt against Muhammad Ali of Egypt.
After WW I, British officials encouraged Arab pogroms in Jerusalem against Jews starting in 1920, then in 1929, and 1936-38. They likewise allowed Arab irregular forces to drive Jews out of their homes in Jerusalem’s Shimon haTsadiq and Nahalat Shimon Quarters in December 1947 and January 1948. They were the first refugees in that war who could not go home after it.
My only objection is to the fact that Ionesco used the rhinoceros to portray those bi-pedal fascists.
The rhinoceros is a conservative animal and only protects itself and its domain.
It is if anything a libertarian.
Cynic,
No he didn’t. Commies R Rhinos too.
E.G.,
No way that rhinos live in communes. They don’t try to control anybody; just keep out of their garden.
The only thing they hate more than something encroaching on their bit grass is the poacher.
Actually the hyena would be more appropriate for his story.
SOMETHING ASKEW AN ISRAELPHOBIC JEW
CHAMPIONING PALESTINIAN NATIONALISM
SOMETHING ASKEW AN ISRAELPHOBIC JEW
REFUSING JEWS SELF-DEFINITION
Poet/Playwright Rochelle Owens
read: “CHOMSKY GRILLING LINGUICA”
New Verse News.Com
Dismantles the flawed and perverse ideology
of the corrupt intellectual.
Cynic,
Yes, I too made the hyenas association. But these animals are not scavengers (though they do love to dispel “narratives” about dead heroes). They feed on lively, living Israeli Jews.
Ionesco’s play denounces totalitarianism in all its forms. See my comment on the Peacock thread.
I think JStreet is a marketing scam primarily motivated to raise money for salaries, advocacy being secondary.
But it will never be successful as it dreams as long as it says it is “pro-Israel.” This “branding” is unattractive to reflexive anti-Zionists, it will not prompt impulse donations. Right wingers and MoveOn NGOs are better at that game.
I see that it was started by a former Israeli. They do not understand Marxist passions and they do not have a good feel for anti-Semitism.
The only reason it is anything is that Obama needs it for his Potemkin Village of support. They will not get much from him, though. His thoughts are above them, he thinks he has a special rapport with the Muslim “world.” I think Joe Biden told him he had that.
Now one of my greater gripes with J-Street concerns the inconsistency with which they apply their principle that pressure should be put “on both sides.” When in doubt, their motto seems to run, squeeze Israel. I am open to correction, but I am unaware of one formal position that they have taken in which Palestinian concessions are the principle target of their actions or declamations.
Yes. That is the salient point. I suggest that they have examined all the failures of various other anti Zionist groupings of US Jews and have decided to ‘push’ for ‘Concessions from both sides’ as a ‘winning feature’. As you have noticed, the ‘feature’ has not been implemented and the whole grouping is just a rehash of other sad and mistaken US Jews who cannot see the writings on the wall.
Thank you for pointing this out so clearly.
Perhaps I’m missing something here. As an architect of the Oslo process, hasn’t time proven the folly of his ways and decisions? How many more times are we to follow the lead of a man who has already led us to the brink of disaster (some would say we’ve passed the brink through Oslo and are now knee deep in it)?
J-Street is nothing more than a Jewish version of Obama’s Organizing for America. It was created with the full intention to give Obama a cover to treat Israel (and by extension, the Jewish community) as he sees fit. Which is to say, poorly.
The Jewish members of J-Street are no better than their counterparts both in Egypt during the Exodus and in Nazi Germany. They were the ones who spied on their fellow Jew in order to curry favor of the oppressors.
We need not judge them for G-d will.
I will purge myself of messianic urges…..I will purge myself of messianic urges…..really, I promise.
Shayne, thanks for your comment (and posting of my piece at your blog). if you check out my tag titled Oslo Logic you’ll find i’ve commented repeatedly on how stupid the folks in policy making are about not learning the lessons of the oslo “peace” process.
I willingly confess.
Yes, I plead guilty of having what is considered bad faith: Jewish faith.
“He who got burnt by boiling [water] is cautious about cold [water].”
The original is in Aramaic and I think it’s in Pirke Avot/ Sayins of the Fathers.
If Peacock Now!™ are not happy about it, it’s their problem. They have a lot of screaming power – but that’s all. They represent tiny fringe.
Maybe it’s time to remember Ulysses’ tactic with the Sirens?
An interview with Elhanan Yakira.
Elhanan Yakira, professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has all the credentials of a man of the Israeli Left: born and raised in Tel Aviv as a Zionist and socialist , a lifelong secular Jew, an opponent of West Bank settlements, an advocate of government intervention in economic policy. Yet many of his colleagues on the Left denounce him as a right-winger and a traitor.
Why?
http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/content/detail/continue-reading-left-in-zion
Professor Elhanan Yakira – “Anti-Zionism as an Intellectual Phenomenon”:
http://vimeo.com/11712493
(on the same YIISA “page” there are more very interesting lectures)
http://www.solomonia.com/blog/archive/2010/05/who-lost-goldstone/
obsy,
I have a post stuck in the filters’ guts.
When it shows up, FYI – at the vimeo site, there’s a talk titled “Purifying the World: What the Radical Anti-Empire Ideology Stands For” by Professor Ernest Sternberg.
(A propos the cleanliness obsession)
The comment below was originally posted on the “Goldstone to JPost ….” thread in answer to EG. I am putting it here too because JStreet recently appealed to Turkey to work for some cause or other of JStreet’s. Maybe now that Turkey is frankly Judeophobic-Israelophobic, the Israelophobic-Judeophobic JStreet will welcome erdogan into its warm bosom, the truth about the Armenian genocide be damned.
- – - – - – - – - – -
EG, is Turkey one of those dark countries OR, now that it is officially anti-Israel and anti-Jewish, is it enlightened & progressive and truly representative of the glorious Tird Woyeld still bravely marching towards a Brave New World on the Road to Development [en voie de developpement — in via di sviluppo] for the past fifty years?? Is Turkey’s continuing membership in NATO now forgiven since it is anti-Israel? Will the Armenian genocide be finally recognized as a fundamentally progressive accomplishment since those Armenians were really all middle class anyway?? Be that as it may, the Armenian genocide cleared eastern Anatolia of its most sizable civilized and civilizing element. So shouldn’t it be heralded the way the narodnaya volya hailed the pogroms against Jews??
http://ziontruth.blogspot.com/2005/10/bolsheviks-for-jihad-genocide-stalins.html
Eliyahu,
Don’t shoot the messenger, please!
I only conveyed what Al-Ard is preaching.
Its enlightened literary supplement editor is a self-declared Turkophile and Egyptophile, and on his blog (only in Hebrew, to the best of my knowledge) he keeps praising these great peoples and the cultural richness of their capital/main city, while comparing them to the horrendous provincial Israelis etc. He’s also Germanophile and Francophile.
Indeed a peacock. And rhining (that is rhinocerosly reigning with a bit of Rhein in der mittel) over the Literatur market/scene…
He’s one of the role models of the character in Latma’s recent satire on Jerusalem.
EG, old Buddy, I wouldn’t shoot you. I am saving my bullets for . . . That’s interesting what you say about the lit editor of al-Ardh. I never buy the paper. It’s not good for my digestion or my chillblains. I do read it once in a while when the clerk at Steimatzky’s does not mind or when I can pick it up gratis at a book fair or cultural event. To build up circulation they give it out free at concerts, at the cinematheque, book fairs, etc. After all, everyone who is cultured and intelligent reads al-Ardh. I on the other hand, can not get over my upbringing on the wrong side of the tracks. Ain’t no culture there.
Cute what you say about the lit editor as a Turkophile. Comrade Karl Marx made some remarks about Turkophiles back in the mid-19th century. He enjoyed laughing at a certain David Urquhart, a merchant in the trade with Turkey and a Turkophile. Yossi Sarid on the other hand, wants study of the Armenian genocide to be introduced into the Israeli school curriculum. I agree on that –of course I don’t agree with Yossi on much else. But if it were introduced, either it might make students suspicious of Islam [if honestly and properly taught] or it would arouse a firestorm of “leftist” special pleading that: It really didn’t happen that way. This teaching is just another way for the West to smear the poor woebegone noble Islamic peoples. Besides, too much reality must not be tolerated!! And so on.
And if evidence is presented about the Armenian genocide from the writings of Zionist heroes, like Aaron Aaronsohn, Eitan Belkind, etc., then that will be another reason to discount the Armenian genocide, just another way for the Zionists to smear Islam because they don’t want peace with the noble Palestinian Muslims –ash-sha`ab ash-sharif — sha`ab jabarin!!! This Zionist myth must be busted!!! If you haven’t heard the Armenian genocide dismissed in those words, well, it’s probably coming.
But I was amazed that JStreet would approach the Turkish embassy in DC as if they had a sterling, squeaky clean, stainless steel record in every way. Once upon a time, Turks and the Ottoman empire had a bad rep for cruelty, brutality, barbarism, and what have you, etc. Isn’t it wonderful what a little anti-Zionism can do?? Here Erdogan has purified the Turkish rep with a few mendacious smears on Israel to hide his own people’s record and his very own record.
if you check out my tag titled Oslo Logic you’ll find i’ve commented repeatedly on how stupid the folks in policy making are about not learning the lessons of the oslo “peace” process
Today I noticed Ross’s and Makivsky’s book in the new books section of the public library and, knowing I was wasting my time, I took a look at it.
After writing a thick book about the utter failure of the peace process and the various myths underlying it, in their conclusions they essentially recommend more of the same.
Methinks that they simply refuse to infer the logical conclusions of their failure because they are incapable of accepting the alternative. they are a one poney show.
I had a friend who’s on the board of B’tselem who kept making the same move towards generosity and understanding and granting the benefit of the doubt to the Palestinians, and when I said, you can’t go there, he said, “that’s the only move i have.” -rl
Here’s another deluded:
Israel needs to “return to strategic centrality” or “reclaim the moral high ground”
http://cgis.jpost.com/Blogs/rosner/entry/israel_needs_to_return_to
Eliyahu,
Old chap is grateful for thy intelligent ammunition eco-policy.
Here’s a piece on the rhinococks grazing and strutting on the pastures of Israeli Academia:
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3891616,00.html
Here’s a piece on the rhinococks grazing and strutting on the pastures of Israeli Academia:
There’s another component of the israeli academia which is wasting resources: IDC Herzlia, whose purpose is to “educate for leadership”. The other day they had a simulation game with politicians, generals and academics — read: the unproductive elite — which reached the conclusion that day after a “nucular” iran, when they send a dirty bomb to lebanon intended for israel, the US (a) stop israel from intervening (b) form a coalition of the willing to enter lebanon and remove the bomb.
Now, how many years of papers and books does one need to know that this is BS? Is any simulation necessary to know this won’t happen?
Here’s evidence that common sense, not academia is what’s sufficient and never the twain shall meet:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/05/21/the_fruits_of_weakness_105676.html
Not much simulation was needed to come up with this:
http://www.carolineglick.com/e/2010/05/south-korea-north-korea-israel.php
More deluded useful idiots jews:
http://cgis.jpost.com/Blogs/rosner/entry/peter_beinart_on_the_failure
They do to Israel what obama is doing to the US.
More on the uselessness of academia:
http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100520/OPINION/705199933/1080
To quote:
The Middle East can be a complex place, but we really shouldn’t go overboard. I will assert my modest expertise here as someone contentedly half-Arab, to say the experts often miss the point. The region’s intricacy is no barrier to appreciating where universal values stand. There is no hidden meaning when regimes brutalise their own citizens and deny them the freedom to express themselves. One doesn’t need a codebook to understand that treating women as chattels is wrong, as is sanctioning the murder of civilians.
These are simple concepts. Most cultures accept them, or claim to. The role of the intellectual is to remind us of these values, not to be immured in citadels of self-satisfaction and exclusivist knowledge.
incognito,
You might be interested in this post about Beinart
Liberalism and Zionism
Of course some blogs in the US see it as a split within Zionism;
but don’t seem to comprehend that the the difference is between those who know and understand the traditions with which they feel an affinity and those who light multicoloured lights on Chanukah to compete with Christmas. (oops, Winter Holiday :-( whatever).
The liberalism of the street is not the social contract of Zion.
Here’s another take on Beinart’s article and seems more to the point
A Growing Rift in the Jewish World?
The trauma of the Holocaust occasioned a brief rapprochement between the two ideologies, but it was bound to end sometime, and as the Holocaust fades from living memory, the old rivalries are beginning to reassert themselves.
Exactly. Those who thought “never again” were fooling themselves. The US jews today are in exactly the same situation as the jews in Germany in the 30s: boy, we are so american, nothing is gonna happen to us. cowardly, it’s the academics among them who also do ” shush, blame and criticize israel so that they don’t think we are jews too. judt as a case in point.
Of course some blogs in the US see it as a split within Zionism; but don’t seem to comprehend that the the difference is between those who know and understand the traditions with which they feel an affinity and those who light multicoloured lights on Chanukah to compete with Christmas. (oops, Winter Holiday :-( whatever).
I’m afraid there is no alternative to a trauma to shaking the liberals out of their delusions. Looks like some jews in UK and France are starting to realize it and get the hell out. It’ll take much more in the US and I would not be surprised if it’ll happen too late just like in the 30s.
They think America is unique. But it is not and it is finished.
It’s a dwindling Jewishness.
Well, you see, the problem with that is that it is only they who think they will pass as non-jews. They will find out the hard way that in a scapegoating crisis like the collapse of the west they will still deemed jews. Otherwise who will be the scapegoat?
Beinart sounds like a jackass in his inaccurate, somewhat incoherent article in NYRB. Here is Shmuel Rosner summarizing Beinart’s article in an interview with him. He is simply dishonest and so are those in Israel whom he refers to as authorities:
Rosner: I counted the many quotes and anecdotes you mention, and again, I find them a little off-balance (politically speaking). You say that “voices from the left, and even center, warn in increasingly urgent tones about threats to Israeli democracy” – but all I see in the article is left (Ezrahi) and far left (Aloni) and maybe radical left (Sternhell, Segev).
Beinart’s answer avoided what Ezrahi, Aloni, Sternhell, etc. were bothered about in their warnings “about threats to Israeli democracy.” These hysterical warnings [in "increasingly urgent tones"] were mainly set off by exposures in the Israeli press of the funding by the New Israel Fund –funded in part by the Ford Foundation– of various political groups that favor the Arab side against Israel, that are subversive in one way or another, and so on. As part of this the director of NIF in Israel, ex-Member of Knesset Naomi Chazan was depicted in a cartoon in a newspaper ad with a rhino horn coming out of her face. I thought it was funny and did not violate the standards for good taste in cartoons, in contrast, let’s say, of the depiction of Sharon eating Arab babies as shown in a British cartoon, or of the ugly depictions of Yits’haq Rabin in Arab cartoons after Oslo [see A. Stav's book on "Peace, An Arab Caricature" and booklets on Arab newspaper cartoons also published by Stav].
The point of the cartoon is that the Hebrew word for horn –qeren קרן — is the same as the word for fund or foundation. The horn image took off from Chazan’s role in the New Israel Fund. Chazan and many of her bros and sisters in the movement flipped into hysteria over the cartoon, and probably even more over the revelations of who was funding which anti-Israel hate group. There had also been revelations about EU and UK funding of all sorts of “NGOs” that actually get funding from govts.
So what the “leftist” hysterics were bothered about was not Israeli democracy but the exposure of their funding sources and the threat to their ability to dominate Israeli society with their fake moralistic claims. This is the background to the claims by Beinart’s authoritis, aloni, ezrahi, sternhell, etc. that democracy is under threat. Beinart didn’t want to respond to Rosner’s question directly. He changed the subject by bringing up the false warnings by olmert and barak of an apartheid future if Israel does not do x, y, and z. Olmert is the last one of course whom an Israeli would see as fit to preach morality. If Beinart doesn’t know this then he is poorly informed. If he does know this yet distorts the issue wittingly, then he is a crook.
This is the background to the claims by Beinart’s authoritis, aloni, ezrahi, sternhell, etc. that democracy is under threat.
I am willing to bet that Beinart does not know much about the politics in Israel and that his column is projection from himself — a liberal “jewish” american — to Israeli politics. Most of these people are utterly ignorant of ME reality, they only delude themselves that they know.
And whatever they know they don’t comprehend, hence the need for projection to impose some meaning that that they can understand.
They think America is unique. But it is not and it is finished.
Heh, incognito you’re starting to sound like oao :-)
You’re right about beinart. But there are “leftists” who assume a claim is true –or ought to be true– or ought to be accepted as truth, in any case– just as long as the source is “leftist.” That’s maybe why the Trots were felt to be so threatening back in the 30s and 40s. Here were fellow “leftists”, as fanatically wrong about society and history as the Stalinists were, yet contradicting the Stalinist idolatry towards Stalin, whose cult as a sort of Byzantine iconic Pantocrator was indoctrinated in the good old USSR.
By the way, my forecast in #s 18 & 20 that anti-Zionism and Israelophobia will give the Turks a new, fresh, innocent squeaky clean image, all those ugly hostile tales of 19th and 20th massacres forgotten, is coming true. Note how a horde of Western would-be do-gooders, some of them Greeks, are happily embarking for Hamas-ruled Gaza with their boats full of “humanitarian aid,” oblivious or in sympathy with what Hamas really represents. Note how Greeks are getting into the act too, as if the Anatolian Greeks had not been almost literally driven into the sea in 1922, as they were ethnically cleansed by Comrade Ataturk.
On the Smyrna Affair of 1922, see:
Marjorie Housepian, The Smyrna Affair
Ernest Hemingway, “On the Quai at Smyrna” in In Our Time.
http://www.kobobooks.com/content/On-The-Quai-At-Smyrna/sc-3DCzUqKelEWzHks66xLk0w/page1.html#1
The story of the Anatolian Greeks got a few rare mentions in American arts in
1) Elia Kazan’s movie America, America
2) Eugenides’ novel Middlesex.
[partly excerpted in the New Yorker]
See a Greek statement on this event, showing that the Greeks still had hard feelings about it many years later.
http://www.greecetravel.com/smyrna/
Somehow, my mention of George Horton’s book got erased from #36.
George Horton, The Blight of Asia.
The author was US consul in Smyrna in 1922 and did not approve of policy there. The book is definitely too politically incorrect to get republished but who knows. Get it if you see it used.
eliyahu,
Anybody who knows and understands what’s going on knows where and for what to look and sees all these things that you specify.
Unfortunately, there are too few who know and understand.
Another good rebuttal to Beinart:
Rosner’s Domain: It might be Beinart’s story, but is it the Jewish story?
http://cgis.jpost.com/Blogs/rosner/entry/it_might_be_beinart_s
This together with Kerstein’s pulverize Beinart, I think. But Kerstein’s makes the more important point:
Liberalism has always been, generally speaking, a form of middle class secular messianism; an edifying millenialism for those with much money and many guns between them and reality. Once everyone becomes liberal, liberalism has always assumed, we will all be happy. Beinart, not unlike his predecessors, clearly believes more or less the same thing. Zionism asserts that not only will the Jews not be happy under liberalism and liberalism alone, but they will not even be capable of surviving the depredations of the modern world. For that, a stronger force is needed; namely, national independence and political sovereignty. Of course, there is a strongly messianic element to Zionism as well, especially in its religious form, but it is a competing and different messianism than that of liberalism. Liberalism asserts that for the Jews to be good and free, they must become liberal. Zionism asserts that for the Jews to exist at all, let alone be good and free—or liberal for that matter—they must first have a Jewish state.
Of course, Zionism has had one serious flaw too: the illusion that the jews will survive in their national state. But what exactly was to stop international anti-semitism to turn against that state, which is exactly what happened?
So it looks like neither liberalism nor Zionism are sufficient for jews to survive, but something much more basic which is hard to expect. But the latter gives the jews a much better chance, at least by extending their time.
I think that what will happen to jews if Israel is eliminated is pretty clear even today. And all Beinart’s liberalism won’t help him none. But he deludes himself that it will.
Incog, what you say in your first sentence was stated by Arieh Stav in an editorial in Nativ about 10 years ago or so. But what compounds the problem is the stupidity and stubbornness of the Labor Zionists. Ben Gurion, by the way, wanted to cooperate with Jabotinsky back in the terrible 1930s. He and Jabo reached a common political program. However, BG’s own party shot it down out of leftist stupidity, arrogance and ignorance.
Incog, actually Stav discussed some years ago what you state in the second sentence of the first paragraph of your #41. Israel is now beset by world Judeophobia. And the “liberal” pundits like beinart are either too stupid to understand it [and his piece is not all that coherent] or to dishonest to say what he knows. “Liberal” pundits, as pundits, are on somebody’s payroll, so they tend to dance to the piper’s tune. He who pays the piper calls the tune. ווער האט די מאה האט די דעה But many people are so simpleminded that they imagine that because Obama is Black [actually, 1/2 Black] that he can’t be racist or prejudiced in his own way or serve the purposes of racists, powerful Judeophobes. Nor can those simpleminded folk that the future of civilization –if there is to be one– is at stake when Western powers, especially Obama’s administration, are trying to protect the Iranian Bomb project.
eliyahu,
Saying “never again” is not enough to prevent repetition.
The further new generations are from events, the more the chance that they will repeat. It’s very hard to not forget the past that not even your parents experienced.
For the Beinarts of the world the holocaust is just a word. Also Kerstein is right when he writes about them as “those with much money and guns between them and reality”.
But many people are so simpleminded that they imagine that because Obama is Black [actually, 1/2 Black] that he can’t be racist or prejudiced in his own way or serve the purposes of racists, powerful Judeophobes.
How could he keep the company of Wright, Khaledi et. al. without imbibing judeophobia? My guess is that he figured out the popularity of hating jews and that he could use it for his own purposes. After all you can hardly go wrong screwing the jews.
However, BG’s own party shot it down out of leftist stupidity, arrogance and ignorance.
Another way history repeats itself.
Well, “never again” is recycled into “Never-Never-Land”
http://www.tabletmag.com/life-and-religion/34105/never-never-land/
I’ve always been uncomfortable with western diaspora jews and their positions on Israel.
This is particularly true of US jews. It’s the same problem as the US govt and the ME: they know very little about the ME and they comprehend even less. This includes those who are supportive.
Pollak says it better than all when he demolishes Beinart:
Peter Beinart and the Destruction of Liberal Zionism
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/peter-beinart-and-the-destruction-of-liberal-zionism-15442
A MUST READ!!!!
[...] to death.] Couldn’t ask for a better illustration of the mentality: the suicidal peacock rhinos try to shame their opposition [...]