Hitchens on JFK

[Boris]

Here's another article ripped off from the WSJ Op-Ed page.

I have to say that IMO and as usual Hitchens is right on.

Where's the Aura?

By CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

A short while ago, I chanced to be in Dallas, Texas, making a documentary film. One of the shots involved a camera angle from a big commercial tower overlooking Dealey Plaza and the former "book depository," and it was later necessary for us to take the road through the celebrated underpass. The crew I worked with was younger than I am (you may as well make that much younger) and consisted of a Chinese-Australian, an English girl brought up in Africa, a Jewish guy from Brooklyn and other elements of a cross-section. As we passed the "Grassy Knoll," and looked up at the window, and saw the cross incised in the tarmac, I was interested by their lack of much interest. The event of Nov. 22, 1963 isn't half as real to them as the moment, say, when the planes commandeered by suicide-murderers flew into the New York skyline. Nor, as I realized, is it half as real or poignant to me as the site of Ford's Theater in Washington D.C. Time has a way of assigning value.

I may still be in a minority in this, and don't care if I am, but I am glad to find that the Kennedy drama and the Kennedy cult is falling away into nothingness. The effort of keeping it up is too much trouble. It has been a long time since anyone rang me, or wrote to me, with hectic new information about the real scoop on the assassination. It has been a very long time since I heard anyone argue with conviction (let alone with evidence) that if the president had been spared that day we would not be referring to the Vietnam calamity as "Kennedy's War."

The last thought is also, paradoxically, the kernel of the illusion that still keeps the JFK cult green. In a recent ill-phrased speech, Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts referred with contempt to the combat in Iraq as something cooked up "in Texas." He thereby gave vent to a facile liberal prejudice that still sees the Galahad of Camelot as having been somehow slain by Dallas itself, or by Texas at any rate. And what do we think of, or what are we supposed to think of, when the word "Texas" is invoked? Why, cowboys and gunplay and irresponsible capitalist dynasties.

For those reasons (if not for those reasons alone) Sen. Kennedy might have done better to keep a guard on his tongue. The biographers and archivists have done most of the relevant job of reporting and disclosing, and what they have reported and disclosed is a president frantically "high" on pills of all kinds (that's when he was not alarmingly "low" for the same reason); a president quick on the draw and willing to solicit Mafia hit-men for his foreign policy; a president willing to risk nuclear war to save his own face; a president who bugged his own Oval Office; a president who used the Executive Mansion as a bordello and a president whose name we might never have learned if not for the fanatical determination of his father to purchase him a political career. If a tithe of these things were really true of George Bush, Howard Dean might claim he was onto something. As it is, "the mantle of JFK" is a garment that no serious Democrat can apparently afford to discard. The last time it was plucked from the wardrobe of central casting, it made Bill Clinton look -- at least to the credulous -- like a potential statesman. Which turned out to be about right.

Had Napoleon Bonaparte been fatally hit by a musket ball as he entered Moscow, it was once pointed out, he would have been remembered by history as one of the greatest generals who ever lived. It would be cruel and unfeeling to say that Kennedy's luck and "charisma" did not desert him even in death, and in any case I prefer to blame this callous opinion on those who actually hold it -- namely his hagiographers and mythologists. Who now seriously believes that Kennedy intended to undo his own rash commitment in South Vietnam? Can we not at least agree that his zeal for the assassination of President Diem -- whom he had installed at some price in blood -- was a somewhat contradictory indicator of any intention to disengage?

That would make a point, as it were, for the "Left." But what of the pugnacious anti-communism that Kennedy also maintained when he thought it suited him? Having tried assassination and "deniable" invasion in Cuba, and having helped provoke a missile crisis on which he gambled all of us, he meekly acceded to the removal of American missiles from Turkey and to a pledge that Fidel Castro's regime would be considered permanent. He and his brother did not completely hold to the terms of the latter agreement, it is true, but as a result the United States became indelibly associated with Mob tactics in the Caribbean, and Castro became in effect the President for Life. In this sense, we may say that the legacy of JFK is with us still.

Another inheritance from that period, the Berlin Wall -- which he did not oppose until well after it had been built (having again risked war on the proposition but not felt able to follow up on his punchy short-term rhetoric) -- did not disappear from our lives until a quarter-century later. His was the worst hard-cop/soft-cop routine ever to be attempted, and it suffered from the worst disadvantages of both styles. On the civil rights front at home, by contrast, even the most flattering historians have a hard time explaining how the Kennedy brothers preferred the millimetrical, snail's pace, grudging-and-trudging strategy. But at least this serves to demonstrate that they knew there was such a thing as prudence, or caution.

Every smart liberal of today knows just how to deplore "spin" and "image-building" and media strategy in general. Quite right too, but does anyone ever pause to ask when this manner of politics became regnant? Which Kennedy fan wants to disown the idea that the smoothest guy wins? Yet this awkward thought is gone into the memory hole, along with the fictitious "missile gap" that the boy-wonder employed to attack Eisenhower and Nixon from the Right. As I said at the beginning, I am glad that this spell is fading at last. But I wish its departure would be less mourned. The Kennedy interlude was a flight from responsibility, and ought to be openly criticized and exorcised rather than be left to die the death that sentimentality brings upon itself.

[Utah]

I like Hitchens a lot, but what the hell was the point of this whole article? How is it important? It seems like a tricky slash job aimed at the foundation and heritage of the democratic party. Also, Hitchens makes a lot of statements where he offers zero arguments to support them.

Worthless article in my opinion (other than to learn the word millimetrical)

[hetron]

Of course, part of the Kennedy mystique will always be more fantasy in reality...the whole Camelot thing and whatnot. And it is true that he was a philanderer who got involved with a lot of shady stuff he had no business being in.

But Kennedy was nowhere near the punk this article portrays him. And to try to play the whole liberal/conservative game here is stupid. You know damn well that if JFK was a conservative he would have played up his bravery in the Cuban missile crisis.

[andyfox]

Hitchens is moving right and part of that move must be to slash and burn the icons of the Democratic Party in the Wall Street Journal.

Having said that, though, John Kennedy was indeed a horrible person. We may have deplored the choice of Bush/Gore, but they didn't come close to the truly horrific decision Americans had to make in 1960 between JFK and Richard Nixon.

[Cyrus]

I like Chris Hitchens. He has great moments, eg Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Hillary, Mother Teresa.

But some traits of Old Left "thinking", such as the dreaded determinist workings of History, are aparently impossible to shake off!

Yes, Joseph Kennedy was a despicable anti-semite, Nazi-loving right winger with many ties to criminals and crime. Yes, he financed and propelled his son's political career in Congress, big time. But this is where it gets complicated, too complicated for Hitchens' facile notion of human nature and History : JFK, as the record shows, was able to go beyond the familial roadmap laid out for him and to grow into one of the most able politicians of America.

JFK's ability in command was demonstrated conclusively during the Cuban missile crisis. (Hitchens makes the absurd notion that JFK "caused it" to happen!) During the crisis and in trying to find the right path out of it, JFK demonstrated high intelligence and examplary leadership. Those of you who have read the White House tape transcripts of that era, will easily acknowledge the ability of JFK to allow different viewpoints to be heard, to marshall meeings of creative anarchy and to identify opportunities and correct action plans (and then to lead his administration and the whole country in following them through). Note that this is opposite to the autocratic way Joseph Kennedy managed his family and his affairs and the way JFK was raised.

Someone else, in this thread, very astutely, identified the way exceptional political leaders operate, ie more subtly and in more ways than they allow. JFK was going into Vietnam and appeasing the Cold Warriors on one hand, in his dealing with the Soviets, while he was also trying to work out co-existence with them, like a good realist. (Anyone who has led a large number of people in any kind of organisation knows this.) Note that this was in gross deviation from his father's ideologically unbending anti-communism.

Yes, I believe we would all have been better off if JFK hadn't been murdered. Hitchens is all wrong in this.

Tha aura of Camelot was nurtured by the JFK camp and was indeed the work of the media but not because of some impossible conspiracy! The JFK presidency touched a nerve because the people correctly identified a hope in JFK's leadership of leaving behind the World War II's and the Cold War's legacies and closedmindedness and to move, like that young President, towards a new era.

--Cyrus

PS : For an example of how an otherwsie able politician can fuck up his cause by going after it full throttle wnd without manoevering or playing all sides, look no furter than Clinton's handling of the issue of gays in the U.S. military.

[Cyrus]

"John Kennedy was indeed a horrible person."

Politically? I doubt it very much, to put it mildly. As an individual? Maybe. He was an incorrigible philanderer and I'm sure all the 2+2 posters dislike womanisers!

But as to the "pills" and that JFK was "high" half the time and "low" the other half? That's just nonsense from Hitchens. JFK's public appearances show him to be witty, articulate and at ease. Same goes for his private life and his work in government, as evidenced by his associates' memoirs (no indication of unstable behavior) and the tapes.

I am extremely suspicious of every effort to make a saint out of any politician, and I do know that the whole Camelot thing was over-rated, to say the least, but to dismiss it as cavalierly (excuse the pun) as Hitchens does and to try to paint JFK as some incompetent rich kid is to ignore the zeitgeist of the era. And the potentials in human nature.

"Hitchens is moving to the Right."

Which is always a sad sight.

[brad]

'
Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts referred with contempt to the combat in Iraq as something cooked up "in Texas."
'

if you look at all the facts you have to conclude that it was at least half baked 'in israel'. no joke. half the hawks in the administration have israeli citizenship (eg, richard 'prince of darkness' perle)

[andyfox]

Kennedy was a poor senator, mostly to the right of the mainstream Democratic party in the 1950s. The first bunch of chapters of The Best and The Brightest convey a good sense of Kennedy's politics and there's some disturbing information in Gore Vidal's Palimpsest on Kennedy's personal behavior, this despite Vidal's evident fondness for his friend Jack.

[andyfox]

Perle has Israeli citizenship? Which others do?

It was rumored that Ari Fleischer did, but this was anti-semitism, pure and simple. The charge was made by, among others, Edward Said, in a statement that Said's admirers cannot be proud of.

[Chris Alger]

If "the Kennedy drama and the Kennedy cult is falling away into nothingness," one wonders why Hitchens bothered? Nowadays, the truth of this judgment seems banal, underscored most recently by the absence, during the recent media flaggellation over our Great Unspeakable Sorrow, of of any tribute to anything Kennedy did except die. The laundry list of Kennedy faults reminds me of Hitchens similar outrage about the Royals, so maybe his next piece will be the stupidity of television entertainment. What's new about this and what thinking people really care? He even takes the bible-thumper tack: Kennedy turned the White House into an actual "bordello" in addition to the political bordello it always has been. Big deal. Even Clinton, with his stupid "and I say to you" impression of Kennedy learned the hard way that the President can no longer get blown on the phone, at least not without looking like a dumbass instead of James Bond.

It seems that Hitchens and his new friends at the WSJ op-ed were using a lot of tired filler to bundle another salvo at the war critics, in this case brother Ted. Hitchens finds Kennedy's dig about the war being "cooked up" in Texas "ill-phrased" and unfairly evocative of "cowboys and gunplay and irresponsible capitalist dynasties."

Set aside the "capitalist dynasties" clumsily thrown in so that Hitchens can reach for a kind of accusation of hypocrisy. Kennedy's point is apt. Whereas his brother inherited (and escalated and undoubtedly would have continued) a war forced on him and the country by the foreign policy intelligentsia, and about which there was virtually no visible dissent during Kennedy's life, Bush's war -- the most protested in the history of the world before it even started -- was in fact "cooked up" by Bush at the behest of a handful of revanchist chickenhawks. In the weeks and months after 9/11 gave them their opening, they probably did work over the poor dumb President while was trying to count cows at Crawford. And "cooked up" fairly evokes the slipshod planning that went into it. It now seems obvious that they feared doing even their simpler homework, probably to prevent a dire prognosis from being leaked before we became irrevocably "committed" to the bitter end.

Further, Hitchens is particularly off in defending the Texas image. If Texas elites have been working to correct it, it must have been in between their contest to execute the most people and loosing the bloodhounds to bring back the legislature. I forget: is it still legal to drive down the street drinking a beer, as it was when I grew up there? Did Houston ever fix an additction to laissez-faire so extreme that it was the only major city in the country without zoning laws? Did anyone catch Crile's book about how the monster U.S. aid program to the Afghani mujahideen that worked oh so well was cooked up by a living caricature an East Texas Congressman, the "virtual public outlaw" Charlie Wilson?

If Hitchens thinks that "cowboys" are an unfair image for Texas, he might want to consider all the photo-op pictures of Bush as sqaure-hawed Marlboro man in cowboy boots and shirts at his ranch, milking the image for all its worth. Since the White House is using Southwestern swaggering to sell a war, it seems only too fair to use the same imagery to ridicule it and its chief sponsor, one who doesn't even have the lame excuses of JFK's apologists.

[brad]

just a question. did pollard have israeli citizenship before his 'clandestine activities'? does he now? (or are the israelis clamoring for his release and his 'return' to israel?)

http://www.counterpunch.org/christison1213.html

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CounterPunch

December 13, 2002

A Rose By Another Other Name
The Bush Administration's Dual Loyalties
by KATHLEEN and BILL CHRISTISON
former CIA political analysts

Since the long-forgotten days when the State Department's Middle East policy was run by a group of so-called Arabists, U.S. policy on Israel and the Arab world has increasingly become the purview of officials well known for tilting toward Israel. From the 1920s roughly to 1990, Arabists, who had a personal history and an educational background in the Arab world and were accused by supporters of Israel of being totally biased toward Arab interests, held sway at the State Department and, despite having limited power in the policymaking circles of any administration, helped maintain some semblance of U.S. balance by keeping policy from tipping over totally toward Israel. But Arabists have been steadily replaced by their exact opposites, what some observers are calling Israelists, and policymaking circles throughout government now no longer even make a pretense of exhibiting balance between Israeli and Arab, particularly Palestinian, interests.

In the Clinton administration, the three most senior State Department officials dealing with the Palestinian-Israeli peace process were all partisans of Israel to one degree or another. All had lived at least for brief periods in Israel and maintained ties with Israel while in office, occasionally vacationing there. One of these officials had worked both as a pro-Israel lobbyist and as director of a pro-Israel think tank in Washington before taking a position in the Clinton administration from which he helped make policy on Palestinian-Israeli issues. Another has headed the pro-Israel think tank since leaving government.

The link between active promoters of Israeli interests and policymaking circles is stronger by several orders of magnitude in the Bush administration, which is peppered with people who have long records of activism on behalf of Israel in the United States, of policy advocacy in Israel, and of promoting an agenda for Israel often at odds with existing U.S. policy. These people, who can fairly be called Israeli loyalists, are now at all levels of government, from desk officers at the Defense Department to the deputy secretary level at both State and Defense, as well as on the National Security Council staff and in the vice president's office.

We still tiptoe around putting a name to this phenomenon. We write articles about the neo-conservatives' agenda on U.S.-Israeli relations and imply that in the neo-con universe there is little light between the two countries. We talk openly about the Israeli bias in the U.S. media. We make wry jokes about Congress being "Israeli-occupied territory." Jason Vest in The Nation magazine reported forthrightly that some of the think tanks that hold sway over Bush administration thinking see no difference between U.S. and Israeli national security interests. But we never pronounce the particular words that best describe the real meaning of those observations and wry remarks. It's time, however, that we say the words out loud and deal with what they really signify.

Dual loyalties. The issue we are dealing with in the Bush administration is dual loyalties-the double allegiance of those myriad officials at high and middle levels who cannot distinguish U.S. interests from Israeli interests, who baldly promote the supposed identity of interests between the United States and Israel, who spent their early careers giving policy advice to right-wing Israeli governments and now give the identical advice to a right-wing U.S. government, and who, one suspects, are so wrapped up in their concern for the fate of Israel that they honestly do not know whether their own passion about advancing the U.S. imperium is motivated primarily by America-first patriotism or is governed first and foremost by a desire to secure Israel's safety and predominance in the Middle East through the advancement of the U.S. imperium.

"Dual loyalties" has always been one of those red flags posted around the subject of Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict, something that induces horrified gasps and rapid heartbeats because of its implication of Jewish disloyalty to the United States and the common assumption that anyone who would speak such a canard is ipso facto an anti-Semite. (We have a Jewish friend who is not bothered by the term in the least, who believes that U.S. and Israeli interests should be identical and sees it as perfectly natural for American Jews to feel as much loyalty to Israel as they do to the United States. But this is clearly not the usual reaction when the subject of dual loyalties arises.)

Although much has been written about the neo-cons who dot the Bush administration, the treatment of the their ties to Israel has generally been very gingerly. Although much has come to light recently about the fact that ridding Iraq both of its leader and of its weapons inventory has been on the neo-con agenda since long before there was a Bush administration, little has been said about the link between this goal and the neo-cons' overriding desire to provide greater security for Israel. But an examination of the cast of characters in Bush administration policymaking circles reveals a startlingly pervasive network of pro-Israel activists, and an examination of the neo-cons' voluminous written record shows that Israel comes up constantly as a neo-con reference point, always mentioned with the United States as the beneficiary of a recommended policy, always linked with the United States when national interests are at issue.

The Begats

First to the cast of characters. Beneath cabinet level, the list of pro-Israel neo-cons who are either policy functionaries themselves or advise policymakers from perches just on the edges of government reads like the old biblical "begats." Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz leads the pack. He was a protégé of Richard Perle, who heads the prominent Pentagon advisory body, the Defense Policy Board. Many of today's neo-cons, including Perle, are the intellectual progeny of the late Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a strong defense hawk and one of Israel's most strident congressional supporters in the 1970s.

Wolfowitz in turn is the mentor of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, now Vice President Cheney's chief of staff who was first a student of Wolfowitz and later a subordinate during the 1980s in both the State and the Defense Departments. Another Perle protégé is Douglas Feith, who is currently undersecretary of defense for policy, the department's number-three man, and has worked closely with Perle both as a lobbyist for Turkey and in co-authoring strategy papers for right-wing Israeli governments. Assistant Secretaries Peter Rodman and Dov Zachkeim, old hands from the Reagan administration when the neo-cons first flourished, fill out the subcabinet ranks at Defense. At lower levels, the Israel and the Syria/Lebanon desk officers at Defense are imports from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank spun off from the pro-Israel lobby organization, AIPAC.

Neo-cons have not made many inroads at the State Department, except for John Bolton, an American Enterprise Institute hawk and Israeli proponent who is said to have been forced on a reluctant Colin Powell as undersecretary for arms control. Bolton's special assistant is David Wurmser, who wrote and/or co-authored with Perle and Feith at least two strategy papers for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu in 1996. Wurmser's wife, Meyrav Wurmser, is a co-founder of the media-watch website MEMRI (Middle East Media Research Institute), which is run by retired Israeli military and intelligence officers and specializes in translating and widely circulating Arab media and statements by Arab leaders. A recent investigation by the Guardian of London found that MEMRI's translations are skewed by being highly selective. Although it inevitably translates and circulates the most extreme of Arab statements, it ignores moderate Arab commentary and extremist Hebrew statements.

In the vice president's office, Cheney has established his own personal national security staff, run by aides known to be very pro-Israel. The deputy director of the staff, John Hannah, is a former fellow of the Israeli-oriented Washington Institute. On the National Security Council staff, the newly appointed director of Middle East affairs is Elliott Abrams, who came to prominence after pleading guilty to withholding information from Congress during the Iran-contra scandal (and was pardoned by President Bush the elder) and who has long been a vocal proponent of right-wing Israeli positions. Putting him in a key policymaking position on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is like entrusting the henhouse to a fox.

Pro-Israel activists with close links to the administration are also busy in the information arena inside and outside government. The head of Radio Liberty, a Cold War propaganda holdover now converted to service in the "war on terror," is Thomas Dine, who was the very active head of AIPAC throughout most of the Reagan and the Bush-41 administrations. Elsewhere on the periphery, William Kristol, son of neo-con originals Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb, is closely linked to the administration's pro-Israel coterie and serves as its cheerleader through the Rupert Murdoch-owned magazine that he edits, The Weekly Standard. Some of Bush's speechwriters * including David Frum, who coined the term "axis of evil" for Bush's state-of-the-union address but was forced to resign when his wife publicly bragged about his linguistic prowess * have come from The Weekly Standard. Frank Gaffney, another Jackson and Perle protégé and Reagan administration defense official, puts his pro-Israel oar in from his think tank, the Center for Security Policy, and through frequent media appearances and regular columns in the Washington Times.

The incestuous nature of the proliferating boards and think tanks, whose membership lists are more or less identical and totally interchangeable, is frighteningly insidious. Several scholars at the American Enterprise Institute, including former Reagan UN ambassador and long-time supporter of the Israeli right wing Jeane Kirkpatrick, make their pro-Israel views known vocally from the sidelines and occupy positions on other boards. Probably the most important organization, in terms of its influence on Bush administration policy formulation, is the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). Formed after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war specifically to bring Israel's security concerns to the attention of U.S. policymakers and concentrating also on broad defense issues, the extremely hawkish, right-wing JINSA has always had a high-powered board able to place its members inside conservative U.S. administrations. Cheney, Bolton, and Feith were members until they entered the Bush administration. Several lower level JINSA functionaries are now working in the Defense Department. Perle is still a member, as are Kirkpatrick, former CIA director and leading Iraq-war hawk James Woolsey, and old-time rabid pro-Israel types like Eugene Rostow and Michael Ledeen. Both JINSA and Gaffney's Center for Security Policy are heavily underwritten by Irving Moskowitz, a right-wing American Zionist, California business magnate (his money comes from bingo parlors), and JINSA board member who has lavishly financed the establishment of several religious settlements in Arab East Jerusalem.

By Their Own Testimony

Most of the neo-cons now in government have left a long paper trail giving clear evidence of their fervently right-wing pro-Israel, and fervently anti-Palestinian, sentiments. Whether being pro-Israel, even pro right-wing Israel, constitutes having dual loyalties * that is, a desire to further Israel's interests that equals or exceeds the desire to further U.S. interests * is obviously not easy to determine, but the record gives some clues.

Wolfowitz himself has been circumspect in public, writing primarily about broader strategic issues rather than about Israel specifically or even the Middle East, but it is clear that at bottom Israel is a major interest and may be the principal reason for his near obsession with the effort, of which he is the primary spearhead, to dump Saddam Hussein, remake the Iraqi government in an American image, and then further redraw the Middle East map by accomplishing the same goals in Syria, Iran, and perhaps other countries. Profiles of Wolfowitz paint him as having two distinct aspects: one obessively bent on advancing U.S. dominance throughout the world, ruthless and uncompromising, seriously prepared to "end states," as he once put it, that support terrorism in any way, a velociraptor in the words of one former colleague cited in the Economist; the other a softer aspect, which shows him to be a soft-spoken political moralist, an ardent democrat, even a bleeding heart on social issues, and desirous for purely moral and humanitarian reasons of modernizing and democratizing the Islamic world.

But his interest in Israel always crops up. Even profiles that downplay his attachment to Israel nonetheless always mention the influence the Holocaust, in which several of his family perished, has had on his thinking. One source inside the administration has described him frankly as "over-the-top crazy when it comes to Israel." Although this probably accurately describes most of the rest of the neo-con coterie, and Wolfowitz is guilty at least by association, he is actually more complex and nuanced than this. A recent New York Times Magazine profile by the Times' Bill Keller cites critics who say that "Israel exercises a powerful gravitational pull on the man" and notes that as a teenager Wolfowitz lived in Israel during his mathematician father's sabbatical semester there. His sister is married to an Israeli. Keller even somewhat reluctantly acknowledges the accuracy of one characterization of Wolfowitz as "Israel-centric." But Keller goes through considerable contortions to shun what he calls "the offensive suggestion of dual loyalty" and in the process makes one wonder if he is protesting too much. Keller concludes that Wolfowitz is less animated by the security of Israel than by the promise of a more moderate Islam. He cites as evidence Wolfowitz's admiration for Egyptian President Anwar Sadat for making peace with Israel and also draws on a former Wolfowitz subordinate who says that "as a moral man, he might have found Israel the heart of the Middle East story. But as a policy maker, Turkey and the gulf and Egypt didn't loom any less large for him."

These remarks are revealing. Anyone not so fearful of broaching the issue of dual loyalties might at least have raised the suggestion that Wolfowitz's real concern may indeed be to ensure Israel's security. Otherwise, why do his overriding interests seem to be reinventing Anwar Sadats throughout the Middle East by transforming the Arab and Muslim worlds and thereby making life safer for Israel, and a passion for fighting a pre-emptive war against Iraq * when there are critical areas totally apart from the Middle East and myriad other broad strategic issues that any deputy secretary of defense should be thinking about just as much? His current interest in Turkey, which is shared by the other neo-cons, some of whom have served as lobbyists for Turkey, seems also to be directed at securing Israel's place in the region; there seems little reason for particular interest in this moderate Islamic, non-Arab country, other than that it is a moderate Islamic but non-Arab neighbor of Israel.

Furthermore, the notion suggested by the Wolfowitz subordinate that any moral man would obviously look to Israel as the "heart of the Middle East story" is itself an Israel-centered idea: the assumption that Israel is a moral state, always pursuing moral policies, and that any moral person would naturally attach himself to Israel automatically presumes that there is an identity of interests between the United States and Israel; only those who assume such a complete coincidence of interests accept the notion that Israel is, across the board, a moral state.

Others among the neo-con policymakers have been more direct and open in expressing their pro-Israel views. Douglas Feith has been the most prolific of the group, with a two-decade-long record of policy papers, many co-authored with Perle, propounding a strongly anti-Palestinian, pro-Likud view. He views the Palestinians as not constituting a legitimate national group, believes that the West Bank and Gaza belong to Israel by right, and has long advocated that the U.S. abandon any mediating effort altogether and particularly foreswear the land-for-peace formula.

In 1996, Feith, Perle, and both David and Meyrav Wurmser were among the authors of a policy paper issued by an Israeli think tank and written for newly elected Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu that urged Israel to make a "clean break" from pursuit of the peace process, particularly its land-for-peace aspects, which the authors regarded as a prescription for Israel's annihilation. Arabs must rather accept a "peace-for-peace" formula through unconditional acceptance of Israel's rights, including its territorial rights in the occupied territories. The paper advocated that Israel "engage every possible energy on rebuilding Zionism" by disengaging from economic and political dependence on the U.S. while maintaining a more "mature," self-reliant partnership with the U.S. not focused "narrowly on territorial disputes." Greater self-reliance would, these freelance policymakers told Netanyahu, give Israel "greater freedom of action and remove a significant lever of pressure [i.e., U.S. pressure] used against it in the past."

The paper advocated, even as far back as 1996, containment of the threat against Israel by working closely with * guess who? * Turkey, as well as with Jordan, apparently regarded as the only reliably moderate Arab regime. Jordan had become attractive for these strategists because it was at the time working with opposition elements in Iraq to reestablish a Hashemite monarchy there that would have been allied by blood lines and political leanings to the Hashemite throne in Jordan. The paper's authors saw the principal threat to Israel coming, we should not be surprised to discover now, from Iraq and Syria and advised that focusing on the removal of Saddam Hussein would kill two birds with one stone by also thwarting Syria's regional ambitions. In what amounts to a prelude to the neo-cons' principal policy thrust in the Bush administration, the paper spoke frankly of Israel's interest in overturning the Iraqi leadership and replacing it with a malleable monarchy. Referring to Saddam Hussein's ouster as "an important Israeli strategic objective," the paper observed that "Iraq's future could affect the strategic balance in the Middle East profoundly" * meaning give Israel unquestioned predominance in the region. The authors urged therefore that Israel support the Hashemites in their "efforts to redefine Iraq."

In a much longer policy document written at about the same time for the same Israeli think tank, David Wurmser repeatedly linked the U.S. and Israel when talking about national interests in the Middle East. The "battle to dominate and define Iraq," he wrote "is, by extension, the battle to dominate the balance of power in the Levant over the long run," and "the United States and Israel" can fight this battle together. Repeated references to U.S. and Israeli strategic policy, pitted against a "Saudi-Iraqi-Syrian-Iranian-PLO axis," and to strategic moves that establish a balance of power in which the United States and Israel are ascendant, in alliance with Turkey and Jordan, betray a thought process that cannot separate U.S. from Israeli interests.

Perle gave further impetus to this thrust when six years later, in September 2002, he gave a briefing for Pentagon officials that included a slide depicting a recommended strategic goal for the U.S. in the Middle East: all of Palestine as Israel, Jordan as Palestine, and Iraq as the Hashemite kingdom. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld seems to have taken this aboard, since he spoke at about the same time of the West Bank and Gaza as the "so-called occupied territories" * effectively turning all of Palestine into Israel.

Elliott Abrams is another unabashed supporter of the Israeli right, now bringing his links with Israel into the service of U.S. policymaking on Palestinian-Israeli issues. The neo-con community is crowing about Abrams' appointment as Middle East director on the NSC staff (where this Iran-contra criminal has already been working since mid-2001, badly miscast as the director for, of all things, democracy and human rights). The Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes has hailed his appointment as a decisive move that neatly cocks a snook at the pro-Palestinian wimps at the State Department. Accurately characterizing Abrams as "more pro-Israel, less solicitous of Palestinians" than the State Department and strongly opposed to the Palestinian-Israeli peace process, Barnes gloats that the Abrams triumph signals that the White House will not cede control of Middle East policy to Colin Powell and the "foreign service bureaucrats." Abrams comes to the post after a year in which it had effectively been left vacant. His predecessor, Zalmay Khalilzad, has been serving concurrently as Bush's personal representative to Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban and has devoted little time to the NSC job, but several attempts to appoint a successor early this year were vetoed by neo-con hawks who felt the appointees were not devoted enough to Israel.

Although Abrams has no particular Middle East expertise, he has managed to insert himself in the Middle East debate repeatedly over the years. He has a family interest in propounding a pro-Israel view; he is the son-in-law of Norman Podhoretz, one of the original neo-cons and a long-time strident supporter of right-wing Israeli causes as editor of Commentary magazine, and Midge Decter, a frequent right-wing commentator. Abrams has written a good deal on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, opposing U.S. mediation and any effort to press for Israeli concessions. In an article published in advance of the 2000 elections, he propounded a rationale for a U.S. missile defense system, and a foreign policy agenda in general, geared almost entirely toward ensuring Israel's security. "It is a simple fact," he wrote, that the possession of missiles and weapons of mass destruction by Iraq and Iran vastly increases Israel's vulnerability, and this threat would be greatly diminished if the U.S. provided a missile shield and brought about the demise of Saddam Hussein. He concluded with a wholehearted assertion of the identity of U.S. and Israeli interests: "The next decade will present enormous opportunities to advance American interests in the Middle East [by] boldly asserting our support of our friends" * that is, of course, Israel. Many of the fundamental negotiating issues critical to Israel, he said, are also critical to U.S. policy in the region and "require the United States to defend its interests and allies" rather than giving in to Palestinian demands.

Neo-cons in the Henhouse

The neo-con strategy papers half a dozen years ago were dotted with concepts like "redefining Iraq," "redrawing the map of the Middle East," "nurturing alternatives to Arafat," all of which have in recent months become familiar parts of the Bush administration's diplomatic lingo. Objectives laid out in these papers as important strategic goals for Israel * including the ouster of Saddam Hussein, the strategic transformation of the entire Middle East, the death of the Palestinian-Israeli peace process, regime change wherever the U.S. and Israel don't happen to like the existing government, the abandonment of any effort to forge a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace or even a narrower Palestinian-Israeli peace * have now become, under the guidance of this group of pro-Israel neo-cons, important strategic goals for the United States. The enthusiasm with which senior administration officials like Bush himself, Cheney, and Rumsfeld have adopted strategic themes originally defined for Israel's guidance *and did so in many cases well before September 11 and the so-called war on terror * testifies to the persuasiveness of a neo-con philosophy focused narrowly on Israel and the pervasiveness of the network throughout policymaking councils.

Does all this add up to dual loyalties to Israel and the United States? Many would still contend indignantly that it does not, and that it is anti-Semitic to suggest such a thing. In fact, zealous advocacy of Israel's causes may be just that * zealotry, an emotional connection to Israel that still leaves room for primary loyalty to the United States * and affection for Israel is not in any case a sentiment limited to Jews. But passion and emotion * and, as George Washington wisely advised, a passionate attachment to any country * have no place in foreign policy formulation, and it is mere hair-splitting to suggest that a passionate attachment to another country is not loyalty to that country. Zealotry clouds judgment, and emotion should never be the basis for policymaking.

Zealotry can lead to extreme actions to sustain policies, as is apparently occurring in the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz-Feith Defense Department. People knowledgeable of the intelligence community have said, according to a recent article in The American Prospect, that the CIA is under tremendous pressure to produce intelligence more supportive of war with Iraq * as one former CIA official put it, "to support policies that have already been adopted." Key Defense Department officials, including Feith, are said to be attempting to make the case for pre-emptive war by producing their own unverified intelligence. Wolfowitz betrayed his lack of concern for real evidence when, in answer to a recent question about where the evidence is for Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction, he replied, "It's like the judge said about pornography. I can't define it, but I will know it when I see it."

Zealotry can also lead to a myopic focus on the wrong issues in a conflict or crisis, as is occurring among all Bush policymakers with regard to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The administration's obsessive focus on deposing Yasir Arafat, a policy suggested by the neo-cons years before Bush came to office, is a dodge and a diversion that merely perpetuates the conflict by failing to address its real roots. Advocates of this policy fail or refuse to see that, however unappealing the Palestinian leadership, it is not the cause of the conflict, and "regime change" among the Palestinians will do nothing to end the violence. The administration's utter refusal to engage in any mediation process that might produce a stable, equitable peace, also a neo-con strategy based on the paranoid belief that any peace involving territorial compromise will spell the annihilation of Israel, will also merely prolong the violence. Zealotry produces blindness: the zealous effort to pursue Israel's right-wing agenda has blinded the dual loyalists in the administration to the true face of Israel as occupier, to any concern for justice or equity and any consideration that interests other than Israel's are involved, and indeed to any pragmatic consideration that continued unquestioning accommodation of Israel, far from bringing an end to violence, will actually lead to its tragic escalation and to increased terrorism against both the United States and Israel.

What does it matter, in the end, if these men split their loyalties between the United States and Israel? Apart from the evidence of the policy distortions that arise from zealotry, one need only ask whether it can be mere coincidence that those in the Bush administration who most strongly promote "regime change" in Iraq are also those who most strongly support the policies of the Israeli right wing. And would it bother most Americans to know that the United States is planning a war against Iraq for the benefit of Israel? Can it be mere coincidence, for example, that Vice President Cheney, now the leading senior-level proponent of war with Iraq, repudiated just this option for all the right reasons in the immediate aftermath of the Gulf War in 1991? He was defense secretary at the time, and in an interview with the New York Times on April 13, 1991, he said:

"If you're going to go in and try to topple Saddam Hussein, you have to go to Baghdad. Once you've got Baghdad, it's not clear what you will do with it. It's not clear what kind of government you would put in place of the one that's currently there now. Is it going to be a Shia regime, a Sunni regime or a Kurdish regime? Or one that tilts toward the Ba'athists, or one that tilts toward the Islamic fundamentalists. How much credibility is that government going to have if it's set up by the United States military when it's there? How long does the United States military have to stay to protect the people that sign on for the government, and what happens to it once we leave?"

Since Cheney clearly changed his mind between 1991 and today, is it not legitimate to ask why, and whether Israel might have a greater influence over U.S. foreign policy now than it had in 1991? After all, notwithstanding his wisdom in rejecting an expansion of the war on Iraq a decade ago, Cheney was just as interested in promoting U.S. imperialism and was at that same moment in the early 1990s outlining a plan for world domination by the United States, one that did not include conquering Iraq at any point along the way. The only new ingredient in the mix today that is inducing Cheney to begin the march to U.S. world domination by conquering Iraq is the presence in the Bush-Cheney administration of a bevy of aggressive right-wing neo-con hawks who have long backed the Jewish fundamentalists of Israel's own right wing and who have been advocating some move on Iraq for at least the last half dozen years?

The suggestion that the war with Iraq is being planned at Israel's behest, or at the instigation of policymakers whose main motivation is trying to create a secure environment for Israel, is strong. Many Israeli analysts believe this. The Israeli commentator Akiva Eldar recently observed frankly in a Ha'aretz column that Perle, Feith, and their fellow strategists "are walking a fine line between their loyalty to American governments and Israeli interests." The suggestion of dual loyalties is not a verboten subject in the Israeli press, as it is in the United States. Peace activist Uri Avnery, who knows Israeli Prime Minister Sharon well, has written that Sharon has long planned grandiose schemes for restructuring the Middle East and that "the winds blowing now in Washington remind me of Sharon. I have absolutely no proof that the Bushies got their ideas from him . But the style is the same."

The dual loyalists in the Bush administration have given added impetus to the growth of a messianic strain of Christian fundamentalism that has allied itself with Israel in preparation for the so-called End of Days. These crazed fundamentalists see Israel's domination over all of Palestine as a necessary step toward fulfillment of the biblical Millennium, consider any Israeli relinquishment of territory in Palestine as a sacrilege, and view warfare between Jews and Arabs as a divinely ordained prelude to Armageddon. These right-wing Christian extremists have a profound influence on Bush and his administration, with the result that the Jewish fundamentalists working for the perpetuation of Israel's domination in Palestine and the Christian fundamentalists working for the Millennium strengthen and reinforce each other's policies in administration councils. The Armageddon that Christian Zionists seem to be actively promoting and that Israeli loyalists inside the administration have tactically allied themselves with raises the horrifying but very real prospect of an apocalyptic Christian-Islamic war. The neo-cons seem unconcerned, and Bush's occasional pro forma remonstrations against blaming all Islam for the sins of Islamic extremists do nothing to make this prospect less likely.

These two strains of Jewish and Christian fundamentalism have dovetailed into an agenda for a vast imperial project to restructure the Middle East, all further reinforced by the happy coincidence of great oil resources up for grabs and a president and vice president heavily invested in oil. All of these factors * the dual loyalties of an extensive network of policymakers allied with Israel, the influence of a fanatical wing of Christian fundamentalists, and oil * probably factor in more or less equally to the administration's calculations on the Palestinian-Israeli situation and on war with Iraq. But the most critical factor directing U.S. policymaking is the group of Israeli loyalists: neither Christian fundamentalist support for Israel nor oil calculations would carry the weight in administration councils that they do without the pivotal input of those loyalists, who clearly know how to play to the Christian fanatics and undoubtedly also know that their own and Israel's bread is buttered by the oil interests of people like Bush and Cheney. This is where loyalty to Israel by government officials colors and influences U.S. policymaking in ways that are extremely dangerous.

Kathleen Christison worked for 16 years as a political analyst with the CIA, dealing first with Vietnam and then with the Middle East for her last seven years with the Agency before resigning in 1979. Since leaving the CIA, she has been a free-lance writer, dealing primarily with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Her book, "Perceptions of Palestine: Their Influence on U.S. Middle East Policy," was published by the University of California Press and reissued in paperback with an update in October 2001. A second book, "The Wound of Dispossession: Telling the Palestinian Story," was published in March 2002.

Bill Christison joined the CIA in 1950, and served on the analysis side of the Agency for 28 years. From the early 1970s he served as National Intelligence Officer (principal adviser to the Director of Central Intelligence on certain areas) for, at various times, Southeast Asia, South Asia and Africa. Before he retired in 1979 he was Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis, a 250-person unit. They can be reached at: christison@counterpunch.org


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[andyfox]

I know nothing about Pollard.

There's no doubt the Bush administration features many hard-line hawks who may well be staunchly pro-Israel. Elliot Abrams, for example should be in jail, not just for Iran-contra, but for his criminal activities in support of muderous thugs in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Every reader of this forum knows what I think about Cheney and Perle and Bush and Rumsfeld.

But the intimation that many people in the Bush administration have dual citizenship smacks of anti-semitism, suggesting that the Jews are controlling U.S. mideast policy with "plants" in the administration.

I checked the web for proof of this alleged dual citizenship and all I could find was so-and-so "reportedly" has Israeli citizenship. As I said, Edward Said, for example, said this about Ari Fleischer. When this is said about a Jewish person, without any facts to back it up, it comes across as an anti-semitic statement, which it may well be [i.e, he's not a real American, he's Jewish and he must have his primary allegiance to Israel, after all, he holds Israeli citizenship].

[andyfox]

Wow! Great writing. Reminded me of Hitchens, with a bit of Lewis Lapham thrown in. I had to look up revanchist.

You are, of course, correct about the Kennedy tributes being mostly about his death, rather than his life, but this was, after all, the anniversary of the assassination. Actually, the best assessment of his life I heard was a local interview on radio with Richard Reeves, even though I disagreed with most of Reeves' assessment of Kennedy's accomplishments.

The worst thing I saw was a sycophantic Aaron Brown's interview with Walter Cronkite where Cronkite was the star of assassination weekend. Brown did everything but ask uncle Walter for his autograph.

How far we've descended in the last forty years. JFK got to do Marilyn Monroe (and generously share her with his brother) at the Beverly Hills Hotel and Clinton got Monica Lewinsky standing up in the alcove, worrying about Stephanopolis wandering in and catching them. Happy Birthday Mr. President.

[brad]

' When this is said about a Jewish person, without any facts to back it up'

agree, but doessnt apply to hawks in power who rotate between lobby, US gov, and israeli gov

[Cyrus]

"I checked the web for proof of this alleged dual citizenship and all I could find was so-and-so "reportedly" has Israeli citizenship. As I said, Edward Said, for example, said this about Ari Fleischer. When this is said about a Jewish person, without any facts to back it up, it comes across as an anti-semitic statement, which it may well be [i.e, he's not a real American, he's Jewish and he must have his primary allegiance to Israel, after all, he holds Israeli citizenship]."

I haven't heard of Said's allegation, I don't know whether it's true or not and I haven't checked the web. I will take your word for all of this. But please explain to me, why is that allegation a case of possible anti-semitism? If the person "accused" of having dual citizenship was of any other ethnic group, the allegation would be viewed on its own merits, without the name calling.

If citizenship implies loyalty to one's country, then dual citizenship, by definition, raises the issue of dual loyalties. I truly cannot understand where anti-semitism comes in.

Edward Said, if he actually did claim that abt Fleischer, was not assigning a characteristic nor leveling an accusation to a whole ethnic group. That would be indeed pejudice (anti-semitism). The fact that the serious issue of divided loyalties cannot be discussed without the red herring of anti-semitism being invoked only shows that this discussion is long overdue.

[andyfox]

http://www.counterpunch.org/said02152003.html

"they seem to me slaves of power perfectly embodied in the repetitive monotone of their collective spokesman Ari Fliescher (who I believe is also an Israeli citizen)."

The Jewish spokesperson must have been an Israeli citizen, why else would he be the mouthpiece for this group?

The "I believe" statement was unworthy of Said.

[Gamblor]

But please explain to me, why is that allegation a case of possible anti-semitism? If the person "accused" of having dual citizenship was of any other ethnic group, the allegation would be viewed on its own merits, without the name calling.

Is anti-semitism so innate now, that you don't even notice it?

1) Simply being Jewish is enough to make someone a possible Israeli?

2) Nobody accuses Colin Powell of dual citizenship or dual loyalties simply because he's of non-WASP origin. Can you imagine the uproar if someone accused him of preferential treatment toward any African country?
"Hmmm... you know what Cyrus, I don't like all that humanitarian aid to Somalia. I think Powell had better get his loyalties in order..."

3) Nobody came up with labels for other prejudices because no prejudice is as long standing or as prevalent as anti-semitism. There are no anti-mongoloid or anti-negroids. They are called racists. Only the Jews were hated enough to get their own name.

You'll recall, in "1984", the use of thought police to whitewash the language that didn't fit Big Brother's goals... By whitewashing words like antisemitism, by avoiding calling a spade a spade, you'd fit right in there.

[Gamblor]

[i]half the hawks in the administration have israeli citizenship[i]

Is this a joke?

Even if it isn't... you elected them.

[Gamblor]

The Jews did it.
By DOUGLAS DAVIS

Adolf Hitler was a senior British royal who is alive and well and living in Phoenix, Arizona. The real identity of Hitler, I can exclusively reveal, is none other than Prince John, the epileptic, autistic youngest child of King George V and Queen Mary, who was born in 1905 and supposedly died 14 years later.

It is nonsense, of course. But it is the passionately held belief of a well-educated, highly intelligent Englishman who has gambled, and lost, almost everything he ever possessed in his obsessive quest to prove his theory.

Since he tracked me down earlier this year, my "informant" has bombarded me with a mass of "evidence" he has accumulated around the world.

But, he is a relatively benign breed of the species who is only too anxious to tell his story on demand, without payment, to anyone who will listen.

Such uninvited "informants" are the occupational hazard of most journalists.

The advent of the Internet has, however, catalyzed the industry, giving access to hundreds of millions of Internet users in almost every home, office and school in almost every country on earth for a host of psychotics and conspiracy theorists.

But what is truly alarming about the phenomenon is the enthusiasm with which the delusionary tales of the world's fantasists are so eagerly embraced - not least by some sections of the mainstream media, only too happy to confer a degree of credibility and respectability on any crackpot theory if it promises to boost circulation and ratings.

The grim reality for many of us who labor in the world of grim reality is that whatever the facts, many consumers of information believe what they want to believe.

And Jews in general, and Israel in particular, are among the most frequent victims of this phenomenon.

Conspiracy theories about Jews are as old as conspiracy theories themselves. But the old notions of Christ-killers, political manipulators and financial controllers - still lethally prevalent throughout the Muslim world - have now metastasized into the most outrageous claims about Israel and Israelis.

THE THOUGHTS of Zbeir Sultan, writing in the weekly journal of the Syrian Arab Writers' Union, are instructive. Sultan recently set himself the task of educating his readers - who constitute the writers and intellectuals of the Arab world - about "the dirty satanic methods employed by the Zionist entity to destroy Egypt's society and economy, as well as its military, physical, spiritual and cultural powers."

How so?

One method, he wrote, involves the deliberate infection of Egyptian youth with AIDS by HIV-positive Zionist prostitutes: "The Egyptian police caught many of them and their stories were published in the Egyptian press."

But that is not the only threat the Zionists pose to their neighbors. The Egyptians also, according to Sultan, discovered "Zionist 'gifts' for children - animal-shaped chewing gum that was found to cause sterility." And worse: "The Zionists have also dispensed chewing gum that arouses sexual lust in university students."

When not infecting, sterilizing or libidinizing the youth of Egypt, the evil Zionists are encouraging them to indulge in Satan worship. Sultan also warns his readers, Israeli universities have opened their doors to Egyptian students "so that they can be instructed in Zionist espionage techniques."

Such claims are repeated not only in the many "newsgroups" that have sprung up on the Internet, but also in the mainstream Arab media.

When I challenged one senior Arab colleague about the stream of fantasy paraded as fact in the Arabic media, he replied disarmingly that this is a form of "journalistic license" which is intended to highlight widely held perceptions. It might not be the literal, he said, but it was the perceived truth.

In the media of the Arab world - newspapers, radio, television, books, theater - vituperation against Israel and Jews is as powerful as ever.

"They seem to have run out of words to describe their hatred," said an Egyptian friend this week. "Nothing is too wicked or too evil to ascribe to the Jews and Israel." And that in a country that has ostensibly made its peace with the Jewish state.

SUCH VIEWS are not confined to the wilder fantasies of Arab intellectuals. They are alive - and gaining currency - in a Europe that is fast adjusting to burgeoning Muslim populations

George W. Bush is depicted as wild, dangerous and venal, driven by Jewish lobbyists and accused of "double-standards" in dealing with Israel and its neighbors.

Ariel Sharon fares worse. In the minds of many, he actually eats Palestinian babies for breakfast, as he was depicted by a cartoonist for the Independent.

As the Twin Towers came tumbling down in New York on September 11, the BBC rushed one of its regular Arab analysts into its studio to declare that the atrocity was undoubtedly the work of the Mossad, a deliberate attempt to drive a wedge between America and the Islamic world.

His view went unchallenged by the usually robust BBC interviewer.

But despite later proof of a link with Islamic extremism, the theory took wings. In the minds of those predisposed to this view, it was embellished to include the claim that Jews were actually warned in advance of the attacks and none showed up for work in the Twin Towers on that fateful September 11.

It is all so patently ridiculous that it should be amusing. But it is not because even the most outrageous assertions are making the most profound impression on a broad swathe of apparently sophisticated European opinion that was once considered to be largely sympathetic to Israel and Jews.

No one seriously suggests that all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic in intent or effect, but there is no doubt that some anti-Israel sentiment has become a convenient and respectable form of expressing anti-Semitism for those who still have qualms about speaking openly.

Mavens who measure such phenomenon point to an irrefutable causal link between sustained attacks on Israel and manifestations of anti-Semitism, ranging from taunts to assaults, from synagogue daubings to cemetery desecrations and the torching of Jewish schools.

THE FRENCH media have never been known to pull their punches when it comes to vilifying Israel, so it was not altogether surprising to learn that a new Jewish school in the Paris suburb of St. Denis, was burnt down this week.

President Jacques Chirac boldly summoned an emergency cabinet meeting to condemn anti-Semitism in the most forceful terms, but the stable door had been left wide open and the horse had bolted.

In a country where presidential elections are usually balanced on a knife's edge, it is unlikely that any French leader would be prepared to lay down his political life to defend Jews and antagonize a Muslim population that now numbers some six million.

In 2002, statistics by the French Justice Ministry showed that six out of 10 acts of racism were directed at Jewish targets. At the same time, a poll revealed that just one French person in 20 believed this figure to be true.

"If racism and anti-Semitism are a daily reality in France today, it is not acknowledged," says Fran ois Zimeray, one of the few French members of the European Parliament who is concerned about anti-Semitism.

But France is not alone, and Europe's neo-religious drive toward "inclusion" and "multiculturalism" is lending credibility to fancies about Jews and fantasies about Israel that are also having a profoundly corrosive effect on the European grass-roots.

The now-celebrated opinion poll conducted for the European Union earlier this month showed that 59 percent of respondents believe that Israel poses the greatest threat to world peace, ahead of such people's democracies as North Korea, Iran, Libya, Syria or even Iraq.

To its credit, the European Union was so shocked by the findings of its own poll that EU President Romano Prodi raced to distance himself from its implications.

"To the extent that this may indicate a deeper, more general prejudice against the Jewish world, our repugnance is even more radical," he said. "There is no place for anti-Semitism and it cannot be tolerated."

That did not impress Mikis Theodorakis, composer of the sublime music for the 1964 film Zorba the Greek, who declared earlier this month that Jews were the cause of all that ails the world.

OLD NOTIONS of manipulative Jews pulling the strings are increasingly becoming the conventional wisdom in Europe.

Earlier this year, the venerable British legislator Tam Dalyell, announced that Bush was being led by the nose by "a cabal of Jews."

It is a view that continues to resonate around the world. Its most recent advocate was Malaysian president Mahathir Mohamad, who baldly informed an Islamic conference last month: "Jews rule the world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them."

Into this new and permissive environment stepped the intellectually elegant Tom Paulin, Oxford University professor of English and poet, to expose the fragility of that anti-Israel/anti-Semitic membrane.

He told the Egyptian daily al-Ahram that Jewish settlers "should be shot dead. I think they are Nazis, racists. I feel nothing but hatred for them." And, for good measure he added: "I never believed that Israel had the right to exist at all."

On a tactical level he counseled the Palestinians to meet force with force, though "It is better to resort to conventional guerrilla warfare [because] attacks on civilians simply boost morale."

When freedom of speech meets incitement to homicide - incitement to kill Jews, that is - there is, apparently, no contest. While Paulin protests he is actually a "philo-Semite," there was barely a murmur of protest from his university and no question of sanctions against him by the BBC, where he continues to star on its flagship weekly television arts program.

The lesson to be learned from Theodorakis, Bernard, Paulin, Mahathir, et al is that Jews (read: Israel) bear original sin for all the evils in the world.

Bombs exploding in a Jerusalem mall or a Netanya hotel, outside an Istanbul synagogue or an Argentinean community center are all portrayed as the response to some prior Jewish/Israeli misdeed. Reality is turned on its head: Victim becomes perpetrator.

EARLIER THIS month, George Bush - the first American president, remember, to advocate the establishment of an independent Palestinian state - attempted to inject a note of reason and realism into the Middle East debate, traversing territory that is a no-go area for European leaders. The Arab world, he said, must embrace democracy.

In a major address to the National Endowment for Democracy, he declared that the only beneficiaries of the Middle East's "freedom deficit" are poverty and ignorance.

"Whole societies remain stagnant while the world moves ahead," he said. "These are not the failures of a culture or a religion. These are the failures of political and economic doctrines."

His blunt, but realistic, message to the Palestinians was that "the only path to independence and dignity and progress is the path of democracy. And the Palestinian leaders who block and undermine democratic reform, who feed hatred and encourage violence, are not leaders at all. They're the main obstacles to peace, and to the success of the Palestinian people."

His message to European leaders was to stop seeking safety in appeasement: "Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty.

"As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment and violence ready for export. And with the spread of weapons that can bring catastrophic harm to our country and to our friends, it would be reckless to accept the status quo."

Instead of dwelling on past wrongs and blaming others, Bush urged Middle East leaders to "confront real problems and serve the true interests of their nations." Sadly, but predictably, the responses from the region have not been positive. Rather, the appeal from Washington was greeted with the traditional brew of suspicion and hostility, drawing deeply on the well of conspiracy.

Writing in the Palestinian Authority's official daily, al-Ayyam, the leading Palestinian political analyst Ali Sadek declared that, "in our view the worst Arab regime, with regard to freedom and constitutional rights, is more democratic than the US." He accused Bush of "searching for an excuse to intimidate the Arab governments so that they would agree to play functional roles that serve his imperialist policy."

Sadek declared American democracy to be "arrogant and offensive."

At the same time, the editorial on the Bush speech filled the entire front page of the Egyptian daily Al-Akhbar. It did not address the fundamental issues raised by Bush, but devoted itself instead to seeking out what it perceived to be the insidious, underlying causes of what it took to be an attack on the Arab world.

The essence of the editorial was that "the Israelis were the ones to have advised President Bush" to issue his "democracy invitation" to the Middle East.

And to ensure that all the bases were covered, the editorial added: "The US Jewish lobby also stands behind this invitation, which contains attacks against Arab governments, in order to damage those relations." In a world that seems poised on the brink of a nervous breakdown, it is time to ask if the real Prince John would please stand up.

Jerusalem Post, Nov 25, 2003

[Cyrus]

I do not have much time for racial prejudice, much less for anti-semitism. But I do not think that Edward Sadi was guilty of anti-semitism in that article (http://www.counterpunch.org/said02152003.html) . I respect your sensitivity on the issue of anti-semitism but methinks you (unavoidably) and Andy Fox read too much into it.

"Simply being Jewish is enough to make someone a possible Israeli?"

No, it takes some of the other "fine qualities" in the politics of Dubya's mouthpiece.

Yes, the issue of dual loyalty is very much alive and important. Pollard and the one-way traffic of intelligence are just a memo's title as to what's going down. And since when do Americans treat the subject of dual citizenship in the highest corridors of power so cavalierly?

"Nobody accuses Colin Powell of dual citizenship or dual loyalties simply because he's of non-WASP origin."

That's because there's no information whatsoever to that effect. As opposed to Said's information about Fleischer. Said could've been misinformed but no an anti-semite (!).

And because there's no African country that wields as much political power as Israel does in American politics, that was beligerent for fifty years and the recipient of ultra-generous American aid (can you spell kickback?), and enjoying an exceptionally special treatment by the United States. If that were the case, I'm sure the Congress would examine very thoroughly issues of dual citizenship between that country and the U.S. in the high echelons of exectuive political power.

Just like it does on issues concerning dual citizenship between Israel and the U.S. /images/graemlins/smirk.gif

[brad]

haldeman and ehrlichmann werent elected and they were criminals.

[Gamblor]

Your point on dual citizenship is taken.

I still maintain that Said's anti-semitism is subtler than you think.

1) As Press Secretary, Ari Fleischer has effectively zero influence on foreign policy, and as such, his citizenship is irrelevant, Israeli or otherwise.

2) Said neglects to provide any basis for his belief that Fleischer is semi-Israeli other than the fact that he is a Jew. It is interesting that this is defended by Mr. Rationality himself, Virus, "who, I believe might be an antelope..." Hyberbole, Virus.

3) The fact that he has Israeli citizenship alone is enough to condemn him as a member of the administration. Nevertheless, he still has American citizenship, which gives him the full rights of any other American, which includes the right to work in the White House. Yet Said implies that because he might have Israeli citizenship, his rights as an American ought to be revoked because them Jews just can't stay on the straight and narrow. Because he's Jewish, he can't do his job properly and fairly?

[brad]

amazingly good guess. you must be psychic

[Gamblor]

haldeman and ehrlichmann werent elected and they were criminals.

What does Nixon have to do with the war in Iraq?

[brad]

'Even if it isn't... you elected them.
'

'haldeman and ehrlichmann werent elected and they were criminals.

What does Nixon have to do with the war in Iraq? '

example of people in high power who were criminals who werent elected.

[Cyrus]

"The French media have never been known to pull their punches when it comes to vilifying Israel, so > > > it was not altogether surprising to learn that a new Jewish school in the Paris suburb of St. Denis, was burnt down this week."

This is a typical non-sequitur, characteristic of those supporters of Israel who find anti-semitism in any criticism of the Holy Land's doings :
Criticise Israel? > > > Jewish schools will be burned, "not surprisingly".

"Mikis Theodorakis, composer of the sublime music for the 1964 film Zorba the Greek, declared earlier this month that Jews were the cause of all that ails the world."

He should be ashamed for this for the rest of his life.

[andyfox]

http://www.whitestruggle.net/bushallegiance.html

This is a sample of the type of web site that has been publicizing the "reported" Israeli citizenship of Ari Fleischer, and "Jew control" of administration policies.

Repeating this with an "I believe" was, as I have said, unworthy of Mr. Said.

[Gamblor]

half the hawks in the administration have israeli citizenship
----------------
Is this a joke?

Even if it isn't... you elected them.
-------------------------------------
'haldeman and ehrlichmann werent elected and they were criminals.
-------------------------------------
What does Nixon have to do with the war in Iraq? '
-------------------------------------------
example of people in high power who were criminals who werent elected.
----------------------------------------

None of this has anything to do with my original challege of your claim that the Iraqi war hawks have Israeli citizenship. Simply being a hawk is not a crime, is it? And just because those two happened not to be elected, doesn't mean others aren't.

[Gamblor]

This is a typical non-sequitur, characteristic of those supporters of Israel who find anti-semitism in any criticism of the Holy Land's doings :
Criticise Israel? > > > Jewish schools will be burned, "not surprisingly".

You don't find a connection between constant criticism of Israel, as opposed to Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt, or a million other religio-apartheid states, and the bombing of Jewish schools? Why aren't Mosques burned and bombed?

[brad]

richard perle being richard perle (ie, prince of darkness), i expect him any day to just come out and say we (US) had to invade iraq for israel.

not kidding.

you see where he came out and said administration knew war was illegal (under international law), but that they felt it was still necessary.

in my opinion, if all these crazies (and they are crazies, thats for sure) were of indian descent and divided loyalty(at least some of them, eg, the ones who have worked for israeli government at least), the US would be invading pakistan about now.

[Cyrus]

"As Press Secretary, Ari Fleischer has effectively zero influence on foreign policy, and as such, his citizenship is irrelevant, Israeli or otherwise."

Zero influence or not, I believe that the American people should know about the citizenship (dual or not) of all the people who are serving the administration. And draw whatever conclusions they want from that information. In any case, Press Secretaries are privy by definition to everything that goes down inside an administration. I'd say that they possess quite a lot of sensitive information, so you don't need to get indignant about Ari's "unimportance".

"[Edward] Said neglects to provide any basis for his belief that Fleischer is semi-Israeli other than the fact that he is a Jew."

That's the hole in your argument, right there. Everybody knows that to obtain an Israeli citizenship, being a Jew helps ! But (a) Edward Said did not claim that all American Jews have also Israeli citizenships. Only Fleischer. (b) This claim, necessarily, is based on information beyond Fleischer being a Jew; otherwise we would have the opposite of (a).

"Said implies that because [Fleischer] might have Israeli citizenship, his rights as an American ought to be revoked because them Jews just can't stay on the straight and narrow. Because he's Jewish, he can't do his job properly and fairly [at the White House]?"

No, Said did not imply any of those silly things.

Again you are intentionally confusing Jewishness with Israeli citizenship. If indeed Fleischer has dual citizenships, this should become known and people would then draw their own conclusions about the potential for dual loyalty. This applies to citizenships for any country --- friend, foe or undecided.

All that other talk about "Jews this" and "Jews that" is intended to scare opponents off, for fear of being labeled anti-semites, but this issue is not as easy to dismiss as you think. Sorry.

--Cyrus

[Cyrus]

"This [website (http://www.whitestruggle.net/bushallegiance.html)]is a sample of the type of web site that has been publicizing the "reported" Israeli citizenship of Ari Fleischer, and "Jew control" of administration policies."

The claim made by Said was a completely legitimate one. It was not an anti-semitic remark nor a smear. The fact that white supremacists or out-and-out fascists, like the scum that operate such websites, are using the same information should perhaps make one more careful -- but not shy away altogether from investigating.

...Unless you think that the issue of dual citizenship/loyalty is not important. In such a case I would understand where you're coming from, but we'd disagree.

"Repeating this with an "I believe" was, as I have said, unworthy of Mr. Said."

On the contrary, this is a sign of intellectual honesty. Edward Said has demonstrated time and again his honesty so there's no need for me to defend him against accusations of prejudice. Prejudice of any kind would be wholly inconsistent with Edward Said's character, life and work (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n20/wood01_.html).

[Cyrus]

"You don't find a connection between constant criticism of Israel [in the French media], as opposed to [criticism of] Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt, or a million other religio-apartheid states, and the bombing of Jewish schools?"

There is no climate of anti-semitic hysteria in France, contrary to what pro-Israeli journalists in America want people to believe. The French, as a matter of fact, are much more preoccupied with the affairs of the Magreb than the Levant. French media is more busy with Algeria than it is with Israel.

"Why aren't Mosques burned and bombed?"

They are. You are simply ignorant of the facts.

[Gamblor]

But (a) Edward Said did not claim that all American Jews have also Israeli citizenships. Only Fleischer. (b) This claim, necessarily, is based on information beyond Fleischer being a Jew; otherwise we would have the opposite of (a).

Wrong again: there is no evidence supporting that claim; one is forced to assume that Said either doesn't have any, or it is so dubious that it is not worthy for inclusion. If it was definite, he would have said: "Fleischer is Israeli".

Furthermore (and now we arrive at the crux of the issue), he only takes issue with Fleischer having Israeli citizenship, not with all the other dual citizen in the American public, because their citizenships are irrelevant to his de facto argument: that the Israeli lobby controls the American government. Wow, never heard that one before.

Sorry.

Why so apologetic? Everyone makes a mistake from time to time.

[Gamblor]

There is no climate of anti-semitic hysteria in France, contrary to what pro-Israeli journalists in America want people to believe.

Oh really? How many more articles do you want? I see great incentive for Pro-Palestinians to downplay the plight of Europe's Jews.

"Why aren't Mosques burned and bombed?"

They are. You are simply ignorant of the facts.

To the same degree as Jewish landmarks? Don't even try.

[andyfox]

I'm a fan of Edward Said's writings. And not just his political stuff; I copied and still have a review he wrote for the New Yorker of Maynard Solomon's biography of Mozart.

But explain to me the reason for him saying that "I believe" Ari Fleischer has Israeli citizenship. What purpose was served by this remark? Did Mr. Said believe the Mr. Fleischer had influence on public policy? A prodigious researcher like Mr. Said could have determined whether or not the White House press secretary did have Israeli citizenship. What was it that made Mr. Said "believe" this? When a reporter called to question him on this, he did not return the calls.

[andyfox]

http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/541

[Cyrus]

Cyrus > "There is no climate of anti-semitic hysteria in France, contrary to what pro-Israeli journalists in America want people to believe."

Gamblor > "Oh really? How many more articles do you want? I see great incentive for Pro-Palestinians to downplay the plight of Europe's Jews."

Once more, you are trying to label anti-Sharon articles & news reports in European media with anti-semitism. Fifty-nine percent of European citizens rightly believe that the state of Israel is enemy of peace number one in the world. You think that 59% of Europeans are anti-semites? Or that they would fall for the alleged anti-semitic propaganda of European media?

You must really take Europeans for fools, to even suggest that.

"[Mosques burned and bombed] to the same degree as Jewish landmarks? Don't even try."

"The same degree", huh? You were denying that Muslim churches are burned at all, remember? Never mind. I am not going down the road of comparing racisms with you: anti-semitism is to be condemned as strongly as any racism. And in Europe there are numerous cases of racist attacks directed against both Muslims and Jews.

(You seem to be ignorant of the strong anti-Arab racist bias extant in France, anti-Turkish racism in Germany and anti-Pakistani racism in Great Britain. The fascists in Europe may be chanting against Jews but are busy hitting darkies.)

[Cyrus]

"There is no evidence supporting that claim; one is forced to assume that Said either doesn't have any, or it is so dubious that it is not worthy for inclusion. If it was definite, he would have said: "Fleischer is Israeli"."

All that verbiage for nothing : Said included the words "I believe" in the sentence precisely because he simply was not 100% sure. You simply have no grounds on which to base your accusations of anti-semitism.

"[Said] only takes issue with Fleischer having Israeli citizenship, [and] not with all the other dual citizen[s] in the American public, because their citizenships are irrelevant to his de facto argument: that the Israeli lobby controls the American government."

Exactly right. Bravo.

This is about the Middle East and American foreign policy. Persons in the American administration that have dual citizenship should have their loyalties scrutinized. Persons that have their other citizenship with a Middle East country even more so.

So, yes, with a dash of exaggeration and generous dose of inaccuracy, of course, as is your wont (Said never claimed that "the Israeli lobby controls the American government" as you so irresponsibly stated) -- but, still, bravo! Nailed it! This is about Israel and the Arabs. Dual citizenships involving Sierra Leone are somewhat unimportant.

[nicky g]

"I see great incentive for Pro-Palestinians to downplay the plight of Europe's Jews."

I think "plight" is a bit strong. There has been a woeful increase in antisemitic incidents in Europe but they still remain thankfully rare. Cyrus's point that there is a lot more anti-Muslim/anti-Arab sentiment is correct. When I lived in Brussels it was more or less acceptable for people to descry "the Morrocans" as thieves, muggers, no good sonsofbitches it etc. Arabs and Turks certainly get a raw deal in France and Germany as well, especialy from the police. (I once saw a Belgian policeman arrest an Arab teenager for crossing the road when the light was red). It's not that long since a hostel was burned down in Germany killing a Turkish family inside. I don't think the level of antisemitic actions are comparable. There have been plenty of attacks on mosques worldwide.

Obviously given Europe's past treatment of Jews people are natually wary and disturbed by any antisemitic incident. But exaggeration or hysteria is not the way to go, and nor is downplaying the problems faced by other minorities.

Finally, for the last time, can I please point out that the poll did not identify Israel as "the number one threat" to world peace. More people rated Israel as a threat to world peace than any other country; but they were not asked to, and did not, rate countries as to how much of a threat they are or which was the "greatest" threat to peace.

[Gamblor]

Once more, you are trying to label anti-Sharon articles & news reports in European media with anti-semitism.

I don't recall saying anything about anti-Sharon articles, or even articles at all. Journalists, despite personal biases, would be ill advised in a Western nation (or France, for that matter) to publish a genuinely anti-semitic article.

I'm referring to the numerous actions of Arabs and Muslims in France defacing Jewish cemetaries and schools, burning synagogues, and beating Jewish citizens - I have posted articles in the past, but in case you forgot, http://www.bigeye.com/jj042802.htm The Canary in Europe's Mine (http://www.bigeye.com/jj042802.htm) is available.

Whether you like it or not, Israel and Judaism may not be the same, they are tied. Israel is still the homeland of the Jewish people. And that is why no Arab and Muslim nation will accept a Jewish-run state - as Secretary General of the Arab league reminded us, as Arabs prepared for war in 1948: "This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre."

anti-semitism is to be condemned as strongly as any racism. And in Europe there are numerous cases of racist attacks directed against both Muslims and Jews.

That's funny, the only other people that believe Jews are a race are here. (http://www.anti-racism.supanet.com/rac/racist.htm) The Semite race, which includes both Jews and Arabs, is I believe what you're referring to when you cite a strong racist bias. But again, you speak of countries and people you have no direct contact with. Unless, of course, you often spend time in France and Israel.

[Gamblor]

Obviously given Europe's past treatment of Jews people are natually wary and disturbed by any antisemitic incident. But exaggeration or hysteria is not the way to go, and nor is downplaying the problems faced by other minorities.

Nobody is downplaying...

The difference is this:

If Arabs don't want to be there anymore, they can all go back to any Arab country and fit in, be a majority. Without a Jewish-majority state, where will the Jews go?

Don't you dare say America.

While this doesn't excuse anti-semitism, arab racism, it does provide an alternative for these victims.

[Gamblor]

Said included the words "I believe" in the sentence precisely because he simply was not 100% sure.

As a responsible academic, how dare he include the words "I believe" when making a claim as concrete as one's citizenships?

This is hardly "I believe the general public is conservative."

This is:
"I believe Virus has 3 arms."
"I believe the sky is green."
"I believe brad is illiterate."

Either Fleischer is, or isn't Israeli.
A 30 second e-mail, a phone call, or even a handwritten letter would have verified that. That he didn't bother to take the time, is evidence of anti-semitism in that he assumes (what is in his mind) the worst about a Jew.

[nicky g]

I don't recall saying anything about Israel or about anyone going anywhere. My point was that antisemitism in Europe is not currently as major a problem as you or others have been making out, and that anti-Arab racism for example is a far greater problem.

If we must discuss this yet again: your solution is for everyone to move back to their country of "origin", even if they weren't born there, even if their parents' parents weren't born there. The vast majority of people, Jews included, would prefer to stay where they are and integrate, while retaining a distinct identity, and fighting racism and prejudice. Suggesting to my wife's family that they might want to move to Israel or that it's their natural homeland would be like telling them to move to the moon; they'd think you were crazy. Most ethnic arabs in Europe are European citizens, and at least second generation, and have no wish to go anywhere, any more than American blacks want to or should go back to Africa.
Nonetheless, if people want to return to their countries of "origin" and can find a way to do so, good luck to them; my probel with Israel is that in doing so they expelled 800,000 people already living there and have treated them and those who remained like animals ever since.

[Gamblor]

have treated...those who remained like animals ever since.

Come on, I'm not going to even consider this. An Israeli Arab is far better off than any other Arab in the Middle East. Why don't you ask Irshad Manji (http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/article.jsp?content=20030929_66149_66149) about her oppression in Israel?

Does your wife light Shabbat Candles every friday?
Does she attend shul every saturday?
Does she drive and write and smoke (if at all) on saturday?
Does she eat pork, bacon, etc. etc.?

If she truly believes that moving to Israel is the same as moving to the moon, she is likely far more secular than most Jews (which is another argument in Israel - if you don't practice the religion at all, are you Jewish?). It is not my position to judge your wife - I'm inclined to believe Judaism is equally about ethics and codes of conduct as it is about prayer and laws. There are tractates in the Mishna concerning everything from business dealings (i.e. it is forbidden to offer less than fair value for a purchase, no matter how desperate a seller is) to the number of times Jerusalem is mentioned per Passover meal (which, I think interesting if not irrelevant to point out, was the Last Supper) - incidentally, Jerusalem is mentioned 3 times in each prayer service, 3 times a day. It is mentioned at Passover, Yom Kippur and nearly every major festivity (weddings and bar mitzvahs). IT is mentioned hundreds of times in the Torah.

Israel, and Jerusalem especially, is as much a part of the Jewish soul as Mecca is to Muslims. When Jordan held Jerusalem, it was turned into what can only be described as a slum. But as my (and most Jewish) ancestors have been kicked out of Poland, Romania, Iraq, and elsewhere, I realize the need to have a haven for Jews to rule themselves.

Anti-semitism may not be a massive problem, but for the students of that school, the families of those bombed synagogues in Turkey, the children of the desecrated graves in France, the Israeli professors who have been shunned by academia, I'd argue it is.

[nicky g]

"Israel, and Jerusalem especially, is as much a part of the Jewish soul as Mecca is to Muslims. "

Undeniably, but how many Muslims want to move to Mecca? I know there are other reasons for Zionism (the argument that there is nowhere else to go), but for many people, the special significance of the land does not mean wanting to live there or establish a state there - which was also the case for the 1800 years or so of the Israel-less diaspora. It is not necessarily about being secular, which my inlaws certainly are - as I understand it, many religiious Jews are actively opposed to the existence of Israel.

"Anti-semitism may not be a massive problem, but for the students of that school, the families of those bombed synagogues in Turkey, the children of the desecrated graves in France, the Israeli professors who have been shunned by academia, I'd argue it is."

I don't wish to downplay the significance of these incidents in themselves, or deny the existence of antisemtisim; just that inflating them into something they aren't is likely to deafen people should the problem turn into something worse. I don't persoanlly support the academic boycott, but I don't believe it's about antisemitism either.

[Gamblor]

Undeniably, but how many Muslims want to move to Mecca?

Aren't Muslims required to visit Mecca once a year?

Given that, and given that under British rule, Jews were subject to bombing and shootings while visiting/living in Jerusalem, Jerusalem stays Israeli.

as I understand it, many religiious Jews are actively opposed to the existence of Israel

Only because they believe that Israel ought not to exist until the coming of the Mashiach/Messiah - at which point, all Jews will return to Israel and they will rebuild the Temple. Wait till you see the Arabs fire their AK47s into the air then.

I don't persoanlly support the academic boycott, but I don't believe it's about antisemitism either.

Then what is it about? A Jew is a Jew is a Jew, whether a general in the Israeli army or a philosophy major at Tel Aviv U, right?

[nicky g]

"Then what is it about? A Jew is a Jew is a Jew, whether a general in the Israeli army or a philosophy major at Tel Aviv U, right?"

Come on we've had this discussion. It's a protest agains the actions of the Israeli state. They're not proposing boycotting non-Israeli Jewish academics. Other countries, notably South Africa, have received the same kind of treatment and it had nothing to do with prejudice.

[Gamblor]

This is in Ha'aretz, the most left-wing newspaper in the Holy Land.

Jews out of Palestine
By Amnon Rubinstein

According to Jewish philosopher Emil Fackenheim, Jew hatred has three stages. In the first stage, the message is you can't live among us as Jews; in the second, it's you can't live among us; and in the third, it's you can't live. The first stage is coerced conversion, the second is expulsion and the third is destruction.

The message of the fourth stage is you can't live in your own country. In the 1930s, the streets of Germany filled with two kinds of graffiti: "Jews Out" and "Jews to Palestine." The call of the new anti-Semitism of our age is "Jews out of Palestine." It characterized not only the traditional Israel haters but also - and mostly - circles dubbed the left nowadays, in Israel, Europe and among "liberal" Americans.

The absurd thing is that negating Israel's right to exist, which provides the intellectual backing for the threats of its destruction, is being done in the name of the most supreme doctrines of human rights and equality. In other words, all nations have the right to self-determination - except the Jews. There is no substantial difference between that and the first stage of traditional anti-Semitism
according to Fackenheim: "You can't live among us as a member of the family of nations."

The fact that the extremist intellectual left is now carrying the banner once hefted by the fascist right in Europe is as traumatic for many contemporary Jews as it was in the late 19th century. True, there are no pogroms and no
Dreyfus trial, but the chief rabbi of France, Joseph Sitruk, goes on radio to tell Jews to avoid wearing a skullcap in public - a call that should have shocked the most secular Jews to their core. The European Social Forum,
meanwhile, invites anti-Semitic Muslim intellectual Tarek Ramadan to join its ranks, and the left in general inspires only deep disappointment when it does not demonstrate
alongside Jews who are afraid to wear a skullcap and are killed at prayers in synagogues.

Those not tainted with fashionable academic ignorance who read Moshe Lilienblum and Yehuda Pinsker nowadays cannot help but feel deep identification with those two writers. It's not only Jews who are hurt by the combination of
extremist Muslims and anti-Semitic leftists.

The French press - including the media very critical of Israel - was shocked by what has happened. On November 18, Le Monde justifiably praised the rapid response by President Jacques Chirac, who called a special session of his cabinet after arsonists struck a Jewish school in Paris on November 15. The newspaper warns of the combination of violent Islamic anti-Semitism and traditional French
anti-Semitism. Le Figaro, on November 17, drew a connection between the events in Istanbul and Paris and the public opinion poll in which Europeans ranked Israel as the leading country endangering world peace. The newspaper added
that the greatest success of the new anti-Semitism is its very banalization.

Gerard Dupuy, writing in Liberation on November 17, opens an editorial on the Turkish bombings with this stunning statement: "In 2003, a person can be killed simply for being Jewish - in Istanbul, Jerba, and Casablanca." He adds
that anyone trying to explain the anti-Semitism, if not justify it, in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is making a moral mistake, because it is a
murderous trend, rooted in Muslim society, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is just an excuse for it. French-Jewish jurist Robert Badinter, a former justice minister and now a socialist senator, was bitter in an interview
with a Catholic publication about how the new anti-Semitism is guised in anti-Zionism. And German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder announced a special session of the European Council on Peace and Security to discuss the issue of the
new anti-Semitism in the spring.

Maybe those same Israeli leftists who dismiss the charges about signs of the new anti-Semitism should read these articles that appeared overseas.

[nicky g]

"According to Jewish philosopher Emil Fackenheim, Jew hatred has three stages. In the first stage, the message is you can't live among us as Jews; in the second, it's you can't live among us; and in the third, it's you can't live. The first stage is coerced conversion, the second is expulsion and the third is destruction.

The message of the fourth stage is you can't live in your own country. In the 1930s, the streets of Germany filled with two kinds of graffiti: "Jews Out" and "Jews to Palestine." The call of the new anti-Semitism of our age is "Jews out of Palestine." It characterized not only the traditional Israel haters but also - and mostly - circles dubbed the left nowadays, in Israel, Europe and among "liberal" Americans. "

I have never argued that Jews should leave Palestine. I have argued that the founders of Israel committed a crime against humanity in expelling 800,000 Palestinians and refusing to let them return, and that they need to make ammends for that as well as ending the occupation. Neither is conceivably antisemitic. Furthermore I am quite happy to see Jews live as Jews wherever they want. So I don't see how the first half of the article is relevant to me or most of the pro-Palestinian left that shares this position. The article completely ignores the very existence of the Palestinians, or the possibility of any legitimate criticism of the state of Israel's actions. As such, the first half is a total waste of space.

As for the second half, it makes clear how seriously all antismemitic incidents are being taken by both the German and French governments and media. So what, precisely, is the problem? THat there are antisemites in Europe there is no doubt. The best we can do is condemn them and fight them. That's what's being done.

[Gamblor]

The myth of Israeli expulsion of Palestinian Arabs is a product of the Palestinian Ministry of Information.

Yes, they were expelled - only after the fedayeen had been defeated, and Israel had won the War of Independence.

I understand the Arab desire to maximize Arab territory and prevent a Jewish (read: non-Muslim) state from materialization. And I might even accept that they went to war over it.

As Azzam Pasha, the secretary-general of the Arab League, vowed, "This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades."

But the fact remains that Israel won that war, and 5 others, and it is plainly obvious that the Arabs do not want it there. They have no problem with the 22 fascist dictatorships that make second class citizens of any non-Muslim. Jews can only be second class - as Ahmed Shuqueiri (ex PLO cheif) announced - "the surviving Jews would be helped to return to their native countries, but my estimation is that none will survive" - they can live, just not here.

What was the Israeli responsibility?

"We appeal ... to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the building-up of the state on the basis of full and equal citizenship and representation in all its ... institutions.

"We extend our hand to all neighbouring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and goodwill, and appeal to them to establish bonds of cooperation and mutual help with the sovereign Jewish people settled in its own land."

- David Ben-Gurion at the signing of Israel's Proclamation of Independence, May 14, 1948

The Arab refugees are now "Palestinians" because no Arab country would admit them permanently (other than Jordan) - See Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan. The PLO has been kicked out for creating trouble in all of those nations.

The Jewish refugees from Arab countries were accepted instantly (if not economically) into Israel.

[nicky g]

"The Jewish refugees from Arab countries were accepted instantly (if not economically) into Israel."

Really!!! How generous of them! And how suprising given their very project was to create a Jewish state, and they were desperate for Jews from all over to move there as soon as possible in order for it to work and rpovide manpower, not to mention live in the houses and till the fields of the Palestinains they'd expelled.


You're a real joker, you know that.

[Gamblor]

Expelled?

"The first group of our fifth column consists of those who abandon their houses and businesses and go to live elsewhere. . . . At the first sign of trouble they take to their heels to escape sharing the burden of struggle."
Ash Shalab (Jaffa newspaper), January 30, 1948

"Of the 62,000 Arabs who formerly lived in Haifa not more than 5,000 or 6,000 remained. Various factors influenced their decision to seek safety in flight. There is but little doubt that the most potent of the factors were the announcements made over the air by the -Higher Arab Executive, urging the Arabs to quit.. . . It was clearly intimated that those Arabs who remained in Haifa and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades."
The Economist, Oct 2, 1948

"It must not be forgotten that the Arab Higher Committee encouraged the refugees' flight from their homes in Jaffa, Haifa, and Jerusalem."
Near East Arabic Broadcasting Station - Cyprus (April 3, 1949)

I do not want to impugn anybody but only to help the refugees. The fact that there are these refugees is the direct consequence of the action of the Arab States in opposing Partition and the Jewish State. The Arab States agreed upon this policy unanimously and they must share in the solution of the problem, [i]
Daily Telegraph, September 6, 1948

[i]The Arab States encouraged the Palestine Arabs to leave their homes temporarily in order to be out of the way of the Arab invasion armies.
Falastin (Jordanian newspaper), February 19, 1949

We will smash the country with our guns and obliterate every place the Jews seek shelter in. The Arabs should conduct their wives and children to safe areas until the fighting has died down.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Said, quoted in Sir Am Nakbah ("The Secret Behind the Disaster") by Nimr el Hawari, Nazareth, 1952

The Arab governments told us: Get out so that we can get in. So we got out, but they did not get in."
from the Jordan daily Ad Difaa, September 6, 1954

"The Arab exodus from other villages was not caused by the actual battle, but by the exaggerated description spread by Arab leaders to incite them to fight the Jews"
Yunes Ahmed Assad, refugee from the town of Deir Yassin, in Al Urdun, April 9, 1953

"the military and civil authorities and the Jewish representative expressed their profound regret at this grave decision [to evacuate]. The [Jewish] Mayor of Haifa made a passionate appeal to the delegation to reconsider its decision"

The Arab National Committee of Haifa, told to the Arab League, quoted in The Refugee in the World, by Joseph B. Schechtman, 1963

And my personal favourite:
"Since 1948 it is we who demanded the return of refugees... while it is we who made them to leave... We brought disaster upon... Arab refugees, by inviting them and bringing pressure to bear upon them to leave... We have rendered them dispossessed... We have accustomed them to begging... We have participated in lowering their moral and social level... Then we exploited them in executing crimes of murder, arson, and throwing bombs upon... men, women and children - all this in service of political purposes..."
Khaled al Azm, Syria's Prime Minister after the 1948 war

[nicky g]

The myth that the Palestinians were encouraged to flee by the invading Arab armies has been disporved, notably in David Hirst's "The Gun and the Olive Branch." In fact numerous broadcasts encouraged them to stay. Many were forcibly made to leave their villages by Israeli soldiers; others fled upon hearing of Deir Yassin and other atrocities (the Arab radio broadcasts admittedly encouraged panic by dwelling on the atrocities for propaganda purposes); many others were forcibly expelled after the war under the absurd absentee/present legislation, undre which they forfeited rights to their property if they had been away from their homes during the war, regardless of where they were and why, and regardless of the fact that they had since come back.

Even if all this were a massive fabrication, it wouldn't change the fact that the refugees should have been allowed to return immediately. Instead their proerty was handed over to Jewish immigrants.

[Gamblor]

So I fabricated those quotes?

Is that your contention?

Or is Hirst's writing law, and any pro-Israeli writing fabricated?

How silly of me, a Palestinian sympathizing British reporter knows all, and the villagers of Deir Yassin, as quoted above, are simply ignorant.

[nicky g]

The Israeli contention that the Palestinians had been ordered to leave was widely accepted until evidence emerged to the contrary. Just read the book. It is not Hirst's mere opinion, it's backed by concrete evidence. I would post it for you myself but I no longer have a computer at home and can't really do it at work.

What the Deir Yassin villager said has some truth to it; as I said in my previous posts, the Arabs did indeed dwell on the disgusting atrocities perpetrated against Palestinians - but as he says, in your quote, it was to encourage them to fight, not to flee.

And at the end of the day, for whatever reasons civilians flee a war, which is eminiently sensible in my opinion, the victors have no right to steal their homes and refuse to allow them to return.

[Gamblor]

the victors have no right to steal their homes and refuse to allow them to return.

How does one allow, back into its midst, an enemy that explicitly and unquestioningly calls for one's destruction?

You want that Hamas Charter link again? How about the PLO charter?

[nicky g]

Neither the PLO nor Hamas existed in 1948. The Palestinian people aren't a political organisation; they're a people who have the same rights as everybody else.

[Gamblor]

Obviously they didn't.

But the fedayeen certainly did, and when they were defeated, well... I reiterate, you want Israel to let them back, after the rapes of Jewish women, after the bombings of Jews visiting the Western Wall, etc. etc. etc.?

[nicky g]

Yes. That's what happens at the end of a war, difficult as it sounds. Anyone who comitted war crimes on either side should be tried for them and punished; the rest should be allowed to reintegrate into society. There's just a long a list, if not longer, of grievances on the other side. The vast majority of the refugees weren't fighters anyway.

[Gamblor]

When considering the application of the term human rights:

How can you consider human anything whose goal to murder as many people as possible without any regard to his own survival? In fact, in the case of bombings, the very method chosen ensures his own destruction, but I also include lone gunmen who fire upon entire groups of patrolling soldiers.

It should be fairly obvious that the attacker is not interested in enjoy the political fruits of his efforts, so the goals of the attackers are not political. If so, what are those goals?

Furthermore, I refuse (and you may disagree with this) to acknowledge as human any individual who explicitly supports (as 80% of Palestinian Arabs do) this method of achieving one's goals, no matter how noble they may seem.

[Cyrus]

You are completely ignorant of what goes on in France (and possibly Israel, as well, despite your delusions to the contrary -- having "lived there" doesn't necessarily make you open-minded, ya know).

As a token of your ignorance of the prevalent nature of those anti-semitic attacks in Europe, I will only tell you that France sports one of the largest neo-fascist (and strongly anti-semitic) Party in western Europe, the National Front, polling some 15% in the elections. It's the Extreme Right in France which has been bashing Arab and Jewish heads, for your information. Your are very poorly informed on the subject but I'm not gonna do your education for you.

"The only other people that believe Jews are a race are here [in the Jewish Christian webring (http://www.anti-racism.supanet.com/idx/m_idx.htm)!]."

Careless web searches are no substitute for real education. But you wouldn't understand. (You didn't even study the website you linked to, carefully!)

"You speak of countries and people you have no direct contact with. Unless, of course, you often spend time in France and Israel."

That's the sixth time you're asking me about that stuff. I'm sure you're dying to know. But I won't play ball, matey.

[Cyrus]

"Asaresponsibleacademichowdareheincludethewords"Ibelieve"
whenmakingaclaimasconcreteasone'scitizenships? Thisis
hardly"Ibelievethegeneralpublicisconservative."

Yes, your arguments make as much sense as the above.

"Either Fleischer is, or isn't Israeli. A 30 second e-mail, a phone call, or even a handwritten letter would have verified that."

To whom exactly?? The Israeli Embassy?

You are making this worse for you : if Fleischer having dual citizenship is NOT a big deal, then Edward Said was entitled to mention it in passing and without making a thesis out of it; if Fleischer's Israeli citizensip IS a big deal, then why are you defending him IN CASE HE HAD IT? /images/graemlins/grin.gif Oy!

"That he didn't bother to take the time, is evidence of anti-semitism in that he assumes (what is in his mind) the worst about a Jew."

But whose mind might that be, yours or just Said's? I'm so glad you agree with me that Fleischer's possible dual citizenship & loyalty IS a big deal! Having both Israeli and American citizenships and serving in the United States administration is a very bad thing, if not as you called it "the worst thing"!

--Cyrus

[Gamblor]

Careless web searches are no substitute for real education. But you wouldn't understand. (You didn't even study the website you linked to, carefully!)

The fact that they are Jews For Jesus is what I found so noteworthy about it. They are the only ones who believe Judaism is a race. End game.

That's the sixth time you're asking me about that stuff. I'm sure you're dying to know. But I won't play ball, matey.

Could you please identify the question I asked?

[Gamblor]

"Mommy, can I have some cookies!"
"But I wanna play Nintendo!"

Yes, I'd half expect this to exit your mouth.

My argument, clearly, is that saying "I believe" does not give me license to put whatever I want into public writing, because as an academic, I should know that my beliefs are only mine, and can not be accepted as fact until I present some sort of proof.

if Fleischer's Israeli citizensip IS a big deal, then why are you defending him IN CASE HE HAD IT

At what point do these fantasies enter your head? Before or after Strom Thurmond in a bikini?

Nowhere have I defended his citizenship. All I have said, since the beginning, is that his citizenship and his ability to be a spokesperson are not mutually exclusive. The very mention of his citizenship as potentially debilitating to his position is anti-semitic. If an Arab were in the White House, would you be hearing the same argument from Said?

Having both Israeli and American citizenships and serving in the United States administration is a very bad thing, if not as you called it "the worst thing"!

As allies that could not at all be the worst thing. Perhaps a Saudi or Iranian. Maybe an ex-Taliban or two.

Maybe we'll get Farrakhan and Arafat in there. Then watch your country go to hell. Maybe Korean Kim in there too. What a party!

[Cyrus]

"Jews For Jesus are the only ones who believe Judaism is a race. End game."

(You wish.) I'm sorry to inform you that that loonie website is not all about that, either. As to Jews, whom I hold dear to my heart (present company not necessarily exempted), you'd be surprised to learn that many Jews consider themselves to be a race. Of many tribes, too...

The confusion between Jewish religion and Jewish nationality is a common mistake that fanatics make. And I'm not necessarily referring to "Jews for Christ" either.

"Could you please identify the question I asked?"

I'll answer you with a question: Have you ever been to Israel ?

[Cyrus]

So, in other words, you're saying that anyone in the White House or the American government can have a second citizenship, besides the American one, as long as that second citizenship is to a "friendly country", right?? Or even a third or fourth citizenship, why not?

/images/graemlins/grin.gif

Well, now. Why do I find this a silly thing, unworthy even of attack? More importantly, why do you find this a worthy position to defend?

"Saying "I believe" does not give me license to put whatever I want into public writing, because as an academic, I should know that my beliefs are only mine, and can not be accepted as fact until I present some sort of proof."

That's what that honest person, Edward Said, did, in fact. He put forth what he believed to be true. You may accuse him of putting across hearsay in his article, but you cannot accuse him of anti-semitism. Either the issue of dual citizenship is a serious one, Mr Pollard, and we should be heavily screening all those folks around the government -or- it is not, and the Said remark was an irrelevancy. Take yer pick.

"If an Arab were in the White House, would you be hearing the same argument from Said?"

I will claim that, in such a case, Edward Said would start a hunger strike in protest of the American government's carelessness!

Note that my claim is as fantastically improbable as your assumption that a person with a dual citizenship to an Arab country would ever be openly admitted into the American government!

Thanks for the laugh, anyway. /images/graemlins/cool.gif