Zionist Censorship at Facebook

Please take a look at http://sabbah.biz/mt/archives/2007/11/14/desperate-to-censorship-facebook/ .

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Check out AOL Money & Finance's list of the hottest products and top money wasters of 2007.

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Neuwirth loses lawsuit against Silverstein

Richard Silverstein describes his victory via anti-SLAPP motion in Rachel Neuwirth's libel lawsuit against him at http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2007/11/28/neuwirth-loses-libel-case-against-tikun-olam/ 

 

Silverstein states the following.

We won the case with an anti-SLAPP (Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation) motion under which the defendant must prove that his speech was made in a public arena and furthered a public good and that the plaintiff was a public figure. Rachel's key defense was that she is a private figure (she argued that she was merely a real estate agent) and the my blog was a private forum (because I "controlled" it), all of which are patently false since she herself calls herself an "internationally respected journalist" in her online bio. That my blog is a public forum is also patently obvious as 250,000 unique visitors each year indicate. And I no more 'control' the 6,000 comments published on my blog than I control the entire web.

Here is Neuwirth's biographical description from Rachel Neuwirth - Guest Contributor to OpEds.com.

Rachel Neuwirth

Rachel Neuwirth, an internationally recognized, political commentator and analyst. She specializes in Middle Eastern Affairs with particular emphasis on Militant Islam and Israeli foreign policy. She has been published in prominent news papers of Europe, Asia and the US. She is frequently quoted by reputable Media. Conversant in Arabic and French.

rachterry@sbcglobal.net

From IsraPundit we learn the following.

Rachel Neuwirth is a Los Angeles-based analyst associated with the American Jewish Congress and Stand With Us.

She seems to be a public figure to me.

The organizations with which she is associated are active and powerful political players.

From http://www.forward.com/forward-50/

Charles Jacobs and Roz Rothstein

 

When it comes to defending Israel in the media, on campus and in the streets, America's long-established Jewish groups no longer have a monopoly. Increasingly, the agenda is set by scrappy startups like Boston's The David Project and the Los Angeles-based StandWithUs ― often dragging the rest of the community along behind them. StandWithUs was founded in 2001 by a group of activists assembled by Roz Rothstein, a family therapist driven by what she saw as the larger community's anemic response to growing anti-Israel activism. The David Project was launched the following year by Charles Jacobs, co-founder of the American Anti-Slavery Group, which targeted slavery in Sudan. Neither Rothstein, 55, nor Jacobs, 63, shies from confrontation. The David Project captured headlines in 2003 with a documentary alleging faculty intimidation of pro-Israel students at Columbia University. More recently, it waged a high-profile legal and media battle with the Islamic Society of Boston over its controversial associates and its plans for a new mosque. This summer, StandWithUs took the lead in responding to a planned pro-Palestinian rally in Washington. While the D.C. Jewish Community Relations Council opted to ignore the demonstration (which was a dud in the end), StandWithUs organized a counter-protest and answered pro-Palestinian ads on Washington's subway system with ads of its own. Both groups have focused on campus activism, multimedia projects, leadership training and curriculum development. The courses Rothstein and Jacobs charted have proven popular with action-hungry donors: Their two startups already boast multimillion-dollar budgets and sizable staffs.

The true name of StandWithUs is the Israel Emergency Alliance, which is LA based. Its FIN is 01-566033, and its public filings are available on line at GuideStar - Search Results - Report Page - ISRAEL EMERGENCY ALLIANCE and probably at other web locations as well.

 

Richard Silverstein states:

[Rachel Neuwirth] sued me for libel in Los Angeles Superior Court because I called her a "Kahanist swine." Her claim was that this was the same as claiming she was a Jewish terrorist since Kahane Chai, Meir Kahane's Israeli political party, is designated by the U.S. Treasury Department as a terrorist organization.

Neuwirth used to correspond with my wife Karin until I told Karin that the discussion was pointless mostly because I had exactly the same impression of Neuwirth as Richard Silverstein has.

 

I am not sure what the description of her as "conversant with Arabic" really means. During the exchange of emails, I was not impressed by Neuwirth's command of Arabic, and I am the first to admit that my Arabic is rather poor.

 

Even though Silverstein hopes Neuwirth will have to dip into her savings to pay both his and her legal expenses, I doubt that Neuwirth will bear the cost of this particular legal escapade. Israel advocacy organizations have adopted an old tactic of lawsuits and threats of lawsuits both to silence critics of Zionism, the State of Israel and the Israel Lobby and also to disenfranchise Muslim and Arab Americans. These organizations and their financial backers are providing the funding for lawsuits by people like James Policastro in Boston and probably by people like Rachel Neuwirth in LA.

 

My wife discusses the Policastro lawsuit in Ethnic Ashkenazim Against Zionist Israel: A Mosque Rises in Boston and in Ethnic Ashkenazim Against Zionist Israel: Emails show pro-Israel anti-Mosque Campaign in Boston. In the defamation and conspiracy lawsuit that the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB) filed in response to the Policastro lawsuit, Floyd Abrams, who was the high-priced attorney for several very wealthy individual defendants, filed a motion for dismissal of the ISB complaint under the Massachusetts anti-SLAPP statute. The court rejected this motion.

Almontaser Must Rescind False and Defamatory Accusations « Stop The Madrassa: Protecting Our Public Schools from Islamist Cur.. provides a NY example of a threat of yet another frivolous legal action but this time against former principal Debbie al-Montaser for accusing the Stop-the-Madrassa Community Coalition of stalking her as part of the campaign against the Khalil Gibran International Academy of NY City.

 

As far as I can tell from published news reports, Stop-the-Madrassa has been stalking her in the commonly accepted popular usage if not in the legal sense just as I have been stalked on the Internet (including in Richard Silverstein's public forum) ever since I had a change of heart about the conflict over Palestine even if I only know of two cases where Israel Advocacy groups actually had someone follow me around Boston. Such behavior is nothing new for Jewish organizations. The ADL has a long history of invasion of privacy and defamation.

 

In my article Ethnic Ashkenazim Against Zionist Israel: Updating "The AJC attacks", I give a reference to the German Jewish use of lawsuits against groups and individuals believed to be enemies of German Jews.

The Downfall of the Anti-Semitic Political Parties in Imperial Germany by R. S. Levy describes in detail how German Jewish advocacy organizations like the Zentralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith) used the legal system

• to force perceived enemies into bankruptcy,
• to attack members of the academic community believed unfriendly,
• to ban books or
• to force publishers to change offending passages.

Like Rosenfeld and Reinharz, Levy often tends to conflate possibly legitimate criticism with anti-Semitism.

Likewise Rachel Neuwirth conflates a reasonable if heated description of her politics with an accusation that she is a terrorist. So far the record of this type of lawsuit has not shown as much success in the USA as such lawsuits did in Wilhelmian Germany, but organizations like the David Project, the AJCongress, the AJCommittee, the ADL, and StandWithUs, which are just as likely to engage in defamation* as to sue for defamation, are nothing if not well funded, stubborn and tenacious.

 

* See Ethnic Ashkenazim Against Zionist Israel: Zionism, Penisism, and Joseph Massad.

 

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Zionism, Penisism, and Joseph Massad

Jumping through Israel Advocacy Hoops

by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

 

On November 20, 2007, Richard Miniter, who is a fellow at the Neocon Hudson Institute, published an attack on Columbia Professor Joseph Massad in the New York Post.  The article's title is "Hate Monger U? Columbia May Tenure Extremist." (See HATEMONGER U?, which is appended below.) Miniter regurgitates material that individual and organizational Israel advocates like the David Project and StandWithUs have crafted as part of an organized campaign or conspiracy to drive critics of Zionism or of Israel out of US academia.

 

Israel advocacy organizations have extensively used Jewish or Zionist media gatekeepers and facilitators in a coordinated effort to place articles and reports like Miniter's column in journals and news broadcasts for the purpose of defaming Arab and Muslim Americans. Jewish government officials like Abigail Thernstrom of the US Commission on Civil Rights have perverted their mandates in order to provide hate-mongers like David Project President Charles Jacobs with the highest political access in Washington. (See Ethnic Ashkenazim Against Zionist Israel: Civil Rights for Some Americans and the paragraph excerpted below from Forward 50.)

 

Other academics targeted for similar slander and libel have included Professors Rashid Khalidi, Georges Saliba, Hamid Dabashi, Nadia Abu el Haj, and Wadie Said. Zionist and Jewish extremists like Daniel Pipes, who heads CampusWatch and who frequently collaborates with the David Project and StandWithUS, have also targeted primary and secondary school personnel like Debby al-Montaser through organizations like the Stop-the-Madrassa "Community Coalition," of whose national advisory board Daniel Pipes is a member.

 

A cabal consisting of Stop-the-Madrassa, NY media corporations, NY city politicians, and various Zionist or Jewish-dominated organizations like the United Federation of Teachers used lies, incitement and intimidation to drive al-Montaser from her position as principal of the Khalil Gibran International Academy in a probable violation of US Code 18.241 "Conspiracy Against Rights" (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/241.html).

 

In his NY Post article, Miniter follows a similar script in making the following false or misleading accusations, which mostly come from David Project literature and from that organization's film entitled Columbia Unbecoming.

In class and in public, Massad has argued that Israel massacred Palestinians at Jenin in 2002. A UN investigation found no evidence of a massacre at Jenin.

Writing in the Egyptian weekly al-Ahram, he suggested that Israel poisoned Yasser Arafat. He cited no evidence. In reality, Israel provided for Arafat's medical evacuation to France.

Massad claims "Jewish colonists [in Israel] were part of the British colonial death squads that murdered Palestinian revolutionaries between 1936 and 1939 while Hitler unleashed Kristallnacht against German Jews." Note the false equivalency between British police and Jewish residents and the Nazis.

...

His published work suggests that his heart lies with the terrorists of Hamas. In March, he mourned the "economic choking and starvation" caused by the "international isolation" of Hamas. Last November, he wrote that Hamas "can defend the rights of the Palestinians to resist the Israeli occupation and the well-armed Palestinian collaborators that help to enforce it."

...

The only book on Israel that he assigned in his introductory class was "Israel, a Colonial Settler State?" by a French Marxist scholar, Maxime Rodinson. It concludes, "Jews have as much right to Israel as Arabs have to Spain."

In addition, Miniter parrots the following anti-Massad talking points.

Three students recently came forward to say that Massad "repeatedly likened Israel to apartheid South Africa, dismissed its legitimacy as a Jewish state and almost never addressed human-rights abuses in countries such as Iraq, Iran and Syria."

Massad regularly told his students that "Zionism got its name from the Hebrew slang for penis, Zayin." While this is plainly untrue, is this the language of a Columbia professor?

The State of Israel prevented the UN from investigating Israeli Defense Force actions at Jenin. 

 

Israeli Mossad agents attempted to poison Hamas leader Khaled Mashal in 1997. Because there is no particular reason to believe that the Israeli government would have any qualms about poisoning any Palestinian or non-Jewish leader under circumstances that would benefit the State of Israel, Professor Massad was hardly unreasonable when he suggested in Al-Ahram Weekly | Opinion | Israel's right to be racist that Israeli operatives might have poisoned Arafat.

 

Professor Massad wrote the following in Al-Ahram Weekly | Opinion | The legacy of Jean-Paul Sartre.

While suspending the status of European Jews as holocaust survivors, these European intellectuals fail to see that much of Zionist colonialism began half a century before the holocaust and that Jewish colonists were part of the British colonial death squads that murdered Palestinian revolutionaries between 1936 and 1939 while Hitler unleashed Kristallnacht against German Jews. Zionism's anti-Semitic project of destroying Jewish cultures and languages in the Diaspora in the interest of an invented Hebrew that none of them spoke, and in the interest of evicting them from Europe and transporting them to an Asian land to which they had never been, is never examined by these intellectuals. Nor do they ever examine the ideological and practical collusion between Zionism and anti-Semitism since the inception of the movement.

Numerous mainstream histories of Zionism and the Zionist colony in British Mandatory Palestine outline precisely the same facts even if they might offer alternative interpretations. Here is the Wikipedia description of Jewish Special Night Squads (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Night_Squads) of the 1930s.

The Special Night Squads (SNS) were a joint British-Jewish force consisting of British soldiers and Jewish Settlement Police, established by Charles Orde Wingate in Palestine in 1936, during the 1936-1939 Arab revolt.

Wingate hand-picked his men, among them Yigal Allon and Moshe Dayan, from the ranks of the Notrim and trained them to form mobile ambushes. As practical support from the British was minimal Wingate collaborated illegally with the Haganah, reinforcing his unit with FOSH regulars.

The force was highly successful in bringing attacks by Arab guerillas on the pipeline of the Iraqi Petroleum Company to a halt. However, the squads were known for their ruthless efficiency and brutal methods. According to Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld their training included "... how to kill without compunction, how to interrogate prisoners by shooting every tenth man to make the rest talk; and how to deter future terrorists by pushing the heads of captured ones into pools of oil and then freeing them to tell the story".^[1]

Yoram Kaniuk writes:

The operations came more frequently and became more ruthless. The Arabs complained to the British about Wingate's brutality and harsh punitive methods. Even members of the field squads complained... that during the raids on Bedouin encampments Wingate would behave with extreme viciousness and fire mercilessly. Wingate believed in the principle of surprise in punishment, which was designed to confine the gangs to their villages. More than once he had lined rioters up in a row and shot them in cold blood. Wingate did not try to justify himself; weapons and war cannot be pure.^[2]

The British viewed Wingate as a security risk and the SNS were disbanded in 1938. Wingate was posted out of the country and his passport was stamped "NOT ALLOWED TO ENTER PALESTINE".^[3]

Field Marshall Montgomery, who as commander of northern Palestine had authorised the SNS, told Dayan in 1966 that he considered Wingate to have "been mentally unbalanced and that the best thing he ever did was to get killed in a plane crash in 1944".^[4]

The Special Night Squads came to be viewed as the British army's first special forces and the forerunners of the Special Air Service regiments.^[5]

Massad is somewhat terminologically sloppy when he describes Zionist anti-Diasporatism as anti-Semitic, but the attitudes of anti-Semites and anti-Diasporatists were for the most part completely congruent and indistinguishable.

 

At the webpage MEALAC | Joseph Massad posts a long reply to the calumnies of the David Project and other Israel advocates.  Massad's response contains the following statement.

During the discussion of Nazi Germany, we addressed the racist ideology of Nazism, the Nuremberg Laws enacted in 1934, and the institutionalized racism and violence against all facets of Jewish life, all of which preceded the extermination of European Jews. This information was also available to Noah in his readings, had he chosen to consult them. Moreover, the lie that the film propagates claiming that I would equate Israel with Nazi Germany is abhorrent. I have never made such a reprehensible equation.

Massad's unwillingness either to identify Zionism as a member of the same class of extremist politicized ethnic fundamentalisms as German Nazism and the Polish Endeks or to describe the clear and obvious similarities of Zionist Israel and Nazi Germany before the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union can only result from Zionist intimidation or from lack of expertise in modern Central and Eastern European Jewish and non-Jewish history. 

Americans often confuse the historical German Nazis with the Hollywood depiction of German Nazis as absolute evil. Walter Rinderle and Bernard Norling point out some of the complexity of the phenomenon of German Nazism in The Nazi Impact on a German Village (p 135).

Until 1938 Jewish families in Lahr county [Germany] believed themselves to be well-integrated into their communities. In Lahr city they received permission to form an NSDAP "Party of Jewish Youth" in 1935, and in Offenburg Jewish founded their own group of patriotic War Veterans.

In contrast, the Palestinian family that considers itself well-integrated into Zionist Israeli society is extremely rare and probably non-existent while a "Party of Palestinian Youth" as an adjunct of a Zionist political party is practically inconceivable. 

Since the 1960s, when Georges Tamarin documented the effect of Israeli Bible education on the attitudes of Israeli Jewish 4th through 8th graders, sociological studies have demonstrated that an ever increasing percentage of Israeli Jewish citizens would commit genocide against non-Jews. If anything, the social-political system that the State of Israel has created is worse than Apartheid as Desmond Tutu and other victims of Apartheid have occasionally noted.

 

One could wish that Professor Massad had a better command of German and Jewish history, but in an American political environment characterized by a relentless effort to enforce a false consensus on the equivalence of Israeli and US interests by means of scare-mongering, courageous academics like Professor Massad and the late French Jewish scholar Maxine Rodinson, who provide alternative interpretations of the conflict over Palestine, are the last hope for democracy.

 

In his book, Rodinson was making a point that would have been obvious if Zionists had not so poisoned American discourse over Palestine. Believing that German Jews and Eastern European Jews have the right to steal Palestine from the native population on the basis of the etymological relationship between "Jew" and "Judea" is so extreme that it is psychotic.  The idea is logically equivalent to believing that the Irish, who are mostly Roman Catholic, would have the right to steal and ethnically cleanse the city of Rome because of the morphological connection between "Roman" and "Rome."

 

Miniter's last accusation against Professor Massad appears to come from the David Project film Columbia Unbecoming (at least according to Solomonia, http://www.solomonia.com/blog/archive/2007/11/professor-massads-penis-lecture-at-colum/).

Below is a videoclip in which Jerusalem Center for Communications and Advocacy Training (JCCAT) founder and director David Olesker, who appears to have a fondness for phallus-related puns, comments on the "Penis" Lecture, which Professor Massad is alleged to have given as part of one of his Columbia courses.

 

 
watch video

In his defense against this accusation, Professor Massad writes the following.

Noah [Liben] seems not to have done his reading during the week on gender and Zionism. One of the assigned readings by Israeli scholar and feminist Simona Sharoni spoke of how in Hebrew the word "zayin" means both penis and weapon in a discussion of Israeli militarized masculinity. Noah, seemingly not having read the assigned material, mistook the pronunciation of "zayin" as "Zion," pronounced in Hebrew "tziyon."

According to http://www.spiroark.org/advocatingforisrae/4517978001, "David Olesker was born in Britain in 1957. He studied at Sunderland Polytechnic College and, after Aliya in 1982, at Yeshivah Ohr Somayach in Jerusalem." A yeshivah is a Jewish seminary. Ohr Somayach is a yeshivah for baalei teshuvah (returnees to Jewish religion -- hozrim bitshuvah is probably a better term).  Noah Weinberg, Mendel Weinbach and Nota Schiller founded Ohr Somayach. Noah Weinberg left to create the Aish haTorah Yeshivah while Weinbach and Schiller continued to run Ohr Somayach.  Aish haTorah is the Jewish face of HonestReporting. 

 

In terms of politics, the principals associated with these organizations tend to identify less with the religious nationalist (mizrahi) Zionism of the Israeli Mafdal party and more with the occult nationalist Zionism of HaRav Avraham Yitzhak Kook and his son or with an extreme antigoyism (anti-Gentilism) that enables the members of the organizations to support a racist Jewish colony in Palestine without contamination by secular Zionist ideas.

 

Although occult nationalist or Kookian Zionists like Jack Abramoff or Michael Medved disdain secular Zionism even in the Jabotinskian form that characterizes Neocons, Kookians (or Kooks as Noam Chomsky prefers to call them) concede that secular Zionists fulfill important religious commandments despite themselves. Extremist antigoyish non-Zionists and anti-Zionists like the Lubovitcher Hasidim, who perceive the State of Israel as an opportunity to bring more Jews back to Judaism, abominate secular Zionism even as they profess to love secular Zionists as Jews.

 

In the early 1980s, a pun popular among American hozrim bitshuvah in Kookian or extremist antigoyist educational programs used the identical pronunciations of the American Yeshivish word zayin (penis) with an un-Israeli accent on first syllable and the standard English noun Zion from which the term Zionist is derived to suggest that secular Zionism was Penisism and that secular Zionists were degenerate immoral sexually obsessed Penisists.

 

While the pun is inadvertently reminiscent of the obsession of Zionist thinkers like Herzl and Nordau with proving Jewish masculinity in the face of common European Jewish and non-Jewish assumptions of Jewish effeminacy (see Smart Jews by Sander Gilman, pp. 103-143), I doubt that any of the Yeshivah students, who made the joke, were actually aware of the fin de siècle Jewish sexual inferiority complex that played such an important role in early Zionist thinking.

 

I heard the pun the New Haven, CT, Monsey, NY, and Chicago, IL, where Ohr Somayach often ran recruitment programs. This play on words almost certainly traveled to the Ohr Somayach Yeshivah in Jerusalem, where David Olesker would have heard it.

 

Charles Jacobs, David Project Director Ralph Avi Goldwasser and other Israel advocates associated with producing Columbia Unbecoming probably got a good laugh by making Columbia faculty and administrators like President Lee Bollinger, whom they almost certainly viewed as a goyisher kop (stupid non-Jew), jump through hoops over an old yeshivah joke.

 

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HATEMONGER U? COLUMBIA MAY TENURE EXTREMIST By RICHARD MINITER November 20, 2007 -- COLUMBIA University is about to give tenure to an anti-Israel extremist. Joseph Massad, an associate professor of modern Arab politics, has a history of shouting down his students. He compares Jews to Nazis and bizarrely accuses Israel of "anti-Semitism" for its treatment of the Palestinians. (Massad is a Palestinian.) In a course description, he describes his class on Israeli-Arab relations as "not balanced." Why does this ivory-tower controversy matter? After 9/11, we simply can't leave Middle East studies to partisans. We need genuine scholars to train future diplomats, analysts and officers. The government and the press rely on professors to explain events in the Arab world. Of course, Columbia has long been home to anti-Israel scholars. Edward Said, who taught there until his death in 2003, spent more time worrying about "US imperialism" and "Zionism" than on injustices such as terrorism and the oppression of women and religious minorities in Arab societies. Most recently, Columbia's sister school, Barnard, tenured Nadia Abu El-Haj, who called the ancient Jewish kingdoms of David and Solomon "a modern nation's [ongoing] myth . . . " Why add one more? Some Internet rumors claim Massad was denied tenure, but Columbia sources say that the process is ongoing; a spokesman insists the details are "confidential." The final decision is due soon. Why shouldn't Massad get tenure - lifelong job security? His critics cite three broad flaws that, taken together, could undermine Columbia's reputation: Misstatement of facts: These are not simple errors; when they've been called to his attention, he has brushed them aside or unconvincingly denied making the statement. In class and in public, Massad has argued that Israel massacred Palestinians at Jenin in 2002. A UN investigation found no evidence of a massacre at Jenin. Writing in the Egyptian weekly al-Ahram, he suggested that Israel poisoned Yasser Arafat. He cited no evidence. In reality, Israel provided for Arafat's medical evacuation to France. Massad claims "Jewish colonists [in Israel] were part of the British colonial death squads that murdered Palestinian revolutionaries between 1936 and 1939 while Hitler unleashed Kristallnacht against German Jews." Note the false equivalency between British police and Jewish residents and the Nazis. And, of course, there is no evidence of organized Jewish involvement. Indeed, the British also took armed action against the Jews. Mistreating students: Over the last few years, a number of students have come forward to talk about how Massad treated them in the classroom. One is Deena Shanker, who attended Massad's course in 2002. She said that Massad shouted her down and ordered her to leave his class if she kept denying that Israel committed atrocities. Massad denied her account and said a faculty panel exonerated him. In fact, the panel's published report found him guilty. The relevant passage: "Upon extensive deliberation, the committee finds it credible that Professor Massad became angered at a question that he understood to countenance Israeli conduct of which he disapproved, and that he responded heatedly. While we have no reason to believe that Professor Massad intended to expel Ms. Shanker from the classroom [she did not, in fact, leave the class], his rhetorical response to her query exceeded commonly accepted bounds by conveying that her question merited harsh public criticism. "Angry criticism directed at a student in class because she disagrees, or appears to disagree, with a faculty member on a matter of substance is not consistent with the obligation 'to show respect for the rights of others to hold opinions differing from their own,' to exercise 'responsible self-discipline' and 'to demonstrate appropriate restraint.' " Why grant tenure to a professor who has an adversarial relationship with his students? A non-scholarly temperament: Massad often seems far more a propagandist than an impartial analyst. His published work suggests that his heart lies with the terrorists of Hamas. In March, he mourned the "economic choking and starvation" caused by the "international isolation" of Hamas. Last November, he wrote that Hamas "can defend the rights of the Palestinians to resist the Israeli occupation and the well-armed Palestinian collaborators that help to enforce it." And, yes, he is critical of Palestinians who criticize Hamas. The only book on Israel that he assigned in his introductory class was "Israel, a Colonial Settler State?" by a French Marxist scholar, Maxime Rodinson. It concludes, "Jews have as much right to Israel as Arabs have to Spain." To students, Massad often seems less like a scholar than a prosecutor presenting his case. Three students recently came forward to say that Massad "repeatedly likened Israel to apartheid South Africa, dismissed its legitimacy as a Jewish state and almost never addressed human-rights abuses in countries such as Iraq, Iran and Syria." Massad regularly told his students that "Zionism got its name from the Hebrew slang for penis, Zayin." While this is plainly untrue, is this the language of a Columbia professor? If he's awarded tenure, Massad will be at Columbia for life. He will have no incentive to become dispassionate - and every incentive to become even more of an activist. Can't Columbia do better? Richard Miniter is a bestselling author and fellow at the Hudson Institute.

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From http://www.forward.com/forward-50/

 

Charles Jacobs and Roz Rothstein

 

When it comes to defending Israel in the media, on campus and in the streets, America's long-established Jewish groups no longer have a monopoly. Increasingly, the agenda is set by scrappy startups like Boston's The David Project and the Los Angeles-based StandWithUs ― often dragging the rest of the community along behind them. StandWithUs was founded in 2001 by a group of activists assembled by Roz Rothstein, a family therapist driven by what she saw as the larger community's anemic response to growing anti-Israel activism. The David Project was launched the following year by Charles Jacobs, co-founder of the American Anti-Slavery Group, which targeted slavery in Sudan. Neither Rothstein, 55, nor Jacobs, 63, shies from confrontation. The David Project captured headlines in 2003 with a documentary alleging faculty intimidation of pro-Israel students at Columbia University. More recently, it waged a high-profile legal and media battle with the Islamic Society of Boston over its controversial associates and its plans for a new mosque. This summer, StandWithUs took the lead in responding to a planned pro-Palestinian rally in Washington. While the D.C. Jewish Community Relations Council opted to ignore the demonstration (which was a dud in the end), StandWithUs organized a counter-protest and answered pro-Palestinian ads on Washington's subway system with ads of its own. Both groups have focused on campus activism, multimedia projects, leadership training and curriculum development. The courses Rothstein and Jacobs charted have proven popular with action-hungry donors: Their two startups already boast multimillion-dollar budgets and sizable staffs.

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Small victory for Prof. David Noble case in Toronto

Henry Lowi forwarded the following list of articles to me and thanked Eibie Weizfeld and Prof. Abbie Bakan for drawing his attention to the case.

Prof. David Noble and his tenacious supporters merit congratulations, but the articles listed below repeat some common misconceptions about Jewish support for free expression. Alvin Rosenfeld and the AJCommittee's attempt to put Jewish progressives under a sort of herem or ban of excommunication is closer to the historical Jewish norm. (See Ethnic Ashkenazim Against Zionist Israel: Updating "The AJC attacks".) 

Columbia Professor Michael Stanislawski's book entitled A Murder in Lemberg describes a violent attempt in 1848 to suppress social-political-religious deviance within the Jewish Community of Austrian Galicia.

Canadian Jewish News: York prof awarded $2,500 in academic freedom dispute

http://www.cjnews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=13592&Itemid=101

York University Faculty Association statement

http://www.yufa.org/stewards/grievances/noble1.html 

David Noble's analysis of the context of his case

http://canadiandimension.com/articles/2005/11/01/209/

Simon Fraser University student newspaper article on Noble case

http://www.peak.sfu.ca/the-peak/2005-1/issue7/ne-ynoble.html 

David Noble's speech at the first NOT IN OUR NAME forum:  A Word About Free Speech

http://www.nion.ca/public-forum-noble.htm

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[The web site of Faculty For Israeli-Palestinian Peace  http://www.ffipp.org/ discusses relevant issues.]

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ADL, Ron Paul, Stormfront

ADL Extremism vs. Stormfront Extremism

by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

 

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) reported on Nov. 15, 2007 (http://www.jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/breaking/105349.html, see below) that "[the] Anti-Defamation League plans to ask Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul to distance himself from extremist groups" because "[his]campaign reportedly has accepted a donation from Don Black, the owner of the white supremacist Web site Stormfront."

 

The JTA used the last paragraph of its report to recall the ADL commendation of Giuliani's rejection of a donation from Saudi Prince Al-Walid bin Talal in order to insinuate some sort of equivalence between receiving $10 million from a respected Saudi philanthropist and accepting a campaign contribution of undisclosed amount from the Stormfront owner.

 

Stormfront is a racist white nationalist organization while the ADL is a racist Jewish nationalist organization that has committed civil or criminal infractions against non-Jews and its Jewish critics since the 1930s. The ADL has a long history of participation in or orchestration of "Conspiracy against Rights" (a criminal violation under 18 USC 241) for the sake of ethnic Ashkenazi tribalism or in support of the State of Israel.

 

The ADL is the official voice of sophisticated Jewish denial of the Zionist genocide against Palestinians and of the Ottoman genocide against Armenians. 

 

Here is article 2 from the international Convention on Genocide (http://www.hrweb.org/legal/genocide.html)

Article 2

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Items a, b, and c have applied to Palestine since racist Eastern European Ashkenazim began to invade Palestine for the purpose of stealing it from the native population at the end of the 19th century. Genocidal Zionist intent against the native population of Palestine can be traced back as far as 1882 as the following citation from Professor Joel Kovel on page 45 of Overcoming Zionism demonstrates.

Thus Vladimir Dubnow, in 1882: "The ultimate goal is, in time, to take over the Land of Israel and to restore to the Jews the political independence they have been deprived of for these two thousand years ... The Jews will yet arise and, arms in hand (if need be), declare that they are the masters of their ancient homeland."

Despite the longstanding intent of Zionists to murder Arab Palestine and the physical destruction of Arab Palestine from 1947 until today, a January 26, 2007 ADL Press Release (Spanish Mayor's Decision to Commemorate 'Palestinian Genocide' On Holocaust Memorial Day 'Shameful') contains the following two paragraphs.

In a letter to Susana León Gordillo, the Mayor of Ciempozuelos, a city near Madrid, and a member of the ruling Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), ADL leaders, Glen S. Lewy, National Chair and Abraham H. Foxman, National Director said, "Your attempt to equate the industrialized mass murder of six million Jewish women, men and children, as well as millions of others, with the situation of the Palestinian people is shameful. It reflects an extremely disturbing tendency, which is particularly visible in Europe, to dishonor the memory of the victims of the Holocaust and de-legitimize the State of Israel by seeking to eradicate the clear moral difference between the Holocaust and the loss of Palestinian lives as a result of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

"Applying the term 'genocide' to the Arab-Israeli conflict encourages hatred toward the State of Israel and deliberately insults those of us, both Jews and non-Jews, who seek to solemnly commemorate the victims of the Nazi campaign of slaughter."

Despite the above ADL assertions the Nakba or Holoexaleipsis (see Holoexaleipsis, Holocaust, Holosphage and Holodomor) is the archetypal genocide of the 20th century.

 

Central and Eastern European hatred and fear of Jews during the 1920s and 1930s is understandable because so many ethnic Ashkenazi Soviet officials were up to their eyeballs in mass murder, ethnic cleansing and genocide from the Russian Revolution through the 1930s in the Soviet Union (see The Pattern of Ethnic Ashkenazi Genocidalism: The Jewish Century by Yuri Slezkine).

 

In contrast German Jewish and ethnic Ashkenazi Zionists plotted the destruction of the native Palestinian population completely in cold blood, for European Jews had practically no contact whatsoever with Palestinians until the Zionist invasion of Palestine began in the late 19th century.

 

The Holoexaleipis should and must be remembered at any commemoration of the Holocaust because Jewish racists and extremists invariably use the Holocaust as a red herring to justify or to distract from Zionist crimes against Palestine. 

 

Zionist denial of the genocide of Armenians is even more sophisticated and calculated.

 

The ADL Statement on the Armenian Genocide includes the following paragraph.

We have never negated but have always described the painful events of 1915-1918 perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire against the Armenians as massacres and atrocities.  On reflection, we have come to share the view of Henry Morgenthau, Sr. that the consequences of those actions were indeed tantamount to genocide [my emphasis]. If the word genocide had existed then, they would have called it genocide.

The systematic slaughter of Armenians is not genocide but is only "tantamount to genocide," for the statement refers only to consequences and not to intent as the Convention on Genocide requires. 

 

The ADL justifies its shyster lawyer legalism by allusion to threats against Turkish Jewry and by the need for good Turkish-American Jewish relations in order to strengthen Turkish-Israeli military cooperation. Neither claim is particularly persuasive because no rational calculation of the interests of the Turkish government could justify punishing Turkish Jews or ending joint military coordination in response to any ADL statement.

 

In reality, the ADL rejects comparison of the Armenian genocide with the Holocaust because any diminution of the uniqueness of the Jewish genocide might weaken Holocaust-based arguments for the legitimacy of the State of Israel and of its brutal or murderous actions against the native Palestinian population.

 

Unlike the ADL, Stormfront does not deny, question or otherwise qualify either the Palestinian genocide or the Armenian genocide.  For the ADL to call Stormfront an extremist organization is a perfect example of the "pot calling the kettle black." 

 

Not only is the ADL at least as much an extremist organization as Stormfront, but it is much more dangerous because the ADL is far sneakier and more strategic in its planning. The ability of Jewish communal and Israel advocacy organizations to manipulate the media by gate-keeping and facilitation represents far more of a threat to American democracy than Stormfront ever could be.

 

Only the excessive power and influence of the organized Jewish community can explain how the ADL could possibly have any legitimacy as an arbiter of extremism and why Don Black's contribution to Ron Paul can become a political issue while the much more serious issue of the importance of racist Jewish or Zionist money in the 2008 presidential campaign remains a taboo subject.

 

In a message dated 11/20/2007 4:22:57 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, Karima4483 writes:

From 

http://www.jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/breaking/105349.html

 

ADL Taking Concerns To Ron Paul

11-15-7

feedback@jta.org

 

The Anti-Defamation League plans to ask Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul to distance himself from extremist groups.

 

Paul, a U.S. congressman from Texas, has come under fire for the support his campaign has enjoyed from leading white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups.

 

His campaign reportedly has accepted a donation from Don Black, the owner of the white supremacist Web site Stormfront. Sites for several extremist groups also feature prominent links supporting Paul's candidacy. ADL's assistant director of civil rights, Steven Freeman, told JTA his organization planned to communicate with Paul privately and urge him to distance himself from those groups.

 

"If he doesn't do that, then we will decide what we're going to say publicly about it," Freeman said.

 

Paul thus far has refused to return the campaign contribution from Black. In response to a question from a reporter for Reason magazine, a campaign spokesperson said, "If people who hold views that the candidate doesn't agree with, and they give to us, that's their loss."

 

The ADL previously has taken candidates to task for their ties to supremacist groups. Last year the organization slammed Larry Darby, a Democratic candidate for attorney general in Alabama, after he attended a meeting of the National Vanguard, a splinter group of the National Alliance. Darby was defeated.

 

In October 2001, the ADL commended New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani for rejecting a $10 million donation to a 9/11 relief fund from Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal. Giuliani, like Paul, is a Republican presidential candidate.

 

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Kovel Pulls No Punches

Why StandWithUs-Michigan Freaked

 

Joel Kovel's latest book entitled Overcoming Zionism is well worth reading because -- among other reasons -- it is a useful and necessary corrective to the campaign of Judea Pearl of the Daniel Pearl Foundation to depict principled anti-Zionism as racism.

 

The book speaks for itself. Unfortunately thanks to the efforts of Zionist censors and especially StandWithUs-Michigan Director Jonathan Harris, who tried to pressure the University of Michigan Press to cease distributing it and any other books from Pluto Press, Overcoming Zionism has become extremely difficult to obtain here in the USA.

 

Below I have provided some selected one and two sentence quotations. Where I have made ellipsis, I have tried to keep true to the meaning of the original text. If I have not done so, I apologize to Professor Kovel and to the reader.

1. While reading Seymour Seymour Hersh's largely forgotten book about the development of Israel's nuclear bomb I was struck by an off-handed sentence that the "CIA  had even been tipped off about the fact that Israel was raising large sums of money for Dimona from the American Jewish community." (p. 2)
2. Those ridden by Zionist logic are bound to project the accusation of antisemitism onto whoever troubles their bad conscience. (p. 7)
3. Alas, many commentators, and chief among them the ideologues of Zionism, insist on keeping up the ridiculous and demeaning charade that Jews, being the most [spiritually/ethically] advanced people, that is, the Chosen Ones, have been essentially innocent of all charges concocted by antisemites. (p. 25)
4. To be a nation, a people has to have an organic relation to a territory, and this the Jews lacked. They had instead a fantasied relation to a mythic territory, the Biblical Israel, which had to stand in for the real, habitable territory until this was gained. (p. 34)
5. All the historiographical exertions by generations of Zionist apologists cannot confer legitimacy on a project in which a variegated people held together by texts and a common faith, and whose actual ethno-national genealogies had been formed all over the map, suddenly decide after two thousand years that they have a real claim on a part of the earth just because it is the center of their Biblical identity. A two thousand-year-old claim would be laughed out of any secular court -- all the more so for the Ashkenazi Jews who comprise the main body of Zionists have little discernable link to the ancient inhabitants of Palestine. (p. 36)
6. The very weakness of the real claim [to Palestine] caused a totalization of the desire, with the result that Zionist nationalism became not the restoration of a land but the establishment of Jewish control over that land, and, coordinatively, the elimination of its indigenous inhabitants. (p. 37)
7. The whole history of the [Zionist] movement gives lie to this benign interpretation [that the Zionist settlers just wanted to live in peace side by side with their Arab hosts], and is still evidenced by the uncompromising, desperate tendency embedded in the conduct of Israel, including the notorious disregard for the rules of international conduct, which abundantly persists to the present day in "special claims," such as never disclosing the existence of its nuclear arsenal, refusing to take down the "apartheid wall" despite the verdict of the International Court of Justice, and innumerable other slaps in the face of world opinion. (p. 38)
8. Thus Vladimir Dubnow, in 1882: "The ultimate goal is, in time, to take over the Land of Israel and to restore to the Jews the political independence they have been deprived of for these two thousand years ... The Jews will yet arise and, arms in hand (if need be), declare that they are the masters of their ancient homeland." (p. 45)
9. A Jew, therefore, could loath fascism at one level, but identify with its brutality at another. ... Thus some Jews could develop a national chauvinist reaction to the Holocaust, in which they might be expected to do unto others something of that which had been done unto them and their families. (p. 74)
10. If a Jew landed in a [German Nazi] concentration camp from 1934 to 1938 it was because he or she was a labor official, or a Communist, or a socialist or an anarchist -- categories into which, it must be added as a matter of fact (and for me, also as a matter of pride), many did fit. (pp 75-76)
11. For the fact that no one would expect Ben-Gurion to actually sacrifice Jewish children on the altar of Zionist nation-building does not mean that he didn't in fact set out to do just that on a smaller scale. (p. 78)
12. The fate of these stateless people [Palestinians dispossessed by Israel's expansion] was sealed by another law that would never have withstood constitutional scrutiny, that of confiscating property allegedly abandoned by Arabs. Thus arose the ghost-littered landscape of modern Israel, a nation built on stolen land. (p. 97)
13. Beneath all the proclamations about Arab terrorism and the ethical nobility of the Jewish state, expropriation by any means necessary is the master narrative necessary to comprehend the history of Israel/Palestine. And so we arrive at a land-grab state that, under the protective wing of its superpower patron, continues the annihilation of Palestinian society, the conversion of the Occupied Territories into a gigantic prison, and the steady expropriation of land. (p. 100)
14. In the meantime, we should recognize that what has been depicted here [the State of Israel] is no true democracy, and certainly not the only such creation in the Middle East. (p. 100)
15. Characteristically, it is the social toxicity of advancing capital that by destroying community, prepares the way for and ignites outbursts of fundamentalism. In the Jewish state, this takes on the additional dimension of being an instrument of ethnic cleansing. (p. 109)
16. But the Jewish state is most certainly an environmental bandit, even more so than the Asian giants. (p. 112)
17. Had not the revered Chaim Weizmann, President of the World Zionist Organization called the Palestinian people, "the rocks of Judea ... obstacles that had to be cleared on a difficult path?" ... Fear and loathing of the Arab translates readily to an augmentation of that characteristic Western attitude that the Zionists brought along with them to their Promised Land, namely that nature was inherently menacing in its "wild" state, and had to be "tamed" if civilization was to survive. (p. 114)
18. Since the 1930s the regime of force has held the highest place in Zionist society, as a liberator, a shield, and increasingly, a source of wealth. No propaganda trick is spared, then, to represent the IDF as Israel's pride and joy. (p. 119)
19. And here it needs be said that a society operating under the terms of Zionism, and engaged in the game of imperial expansion under the tutelage of the great destabilizer that is the United States, neither has nor deserves much of an ecological future. (p. 122)
20. [According to Martin Peretz:] Why even bother with this miserable people, who have contributed nothing to world civilization and are merely one rather insignificant member of the set of stateless nations? In fact, the only interesting thing about the Palestinians is that the Jews have blessed them by being their neighbors. (p. 129)
21. Behind this ratio stands a very intricate relationship, which implies a certain "zionification" of the United States, a kind of mutual adaptation that enables the support system to function routinely and to a degree automatically according to a cybernetic mechanism in which even the slightest criticism of Israel is met with howling accusations of antisemitism. (p. 132)
22. Israel craved [the Iraq] war unreservedly, whereas in the United States significant countervailing voices to the endeavor were heard from senior officials from the Reagan, first Bush and Clinton administrations, who correctly foresaw the catastrophe that would follow upon the invasion. (p. 134)
23. In the neocon promotion of extreme unilateralism, these latter-day messianic Zionists are turning the United States as well as Israel into a "People Apart." (p. 136)
24. AIPAC is a lobby like no other in its ability to intimidate the legislative as well as the executive branches of government. (p. 136)
25. It can be said that Zionism conquered the Democratic Party with the checkbook and the Republicans with their resort to the sword. (p. 138)
26. To say that AIPAC has bought itself a Congress and hence can get them to dance to its tune is more than metaphor. (p. 138)
27. It is a remarkable phenomenon, specific, I should think, to the State of Israel, that its obsession with being the victim of terrorism goes hand in hand with the fact that no fewer than three of its prime ministers have been world-class terrorists, in the sense of having commanded major military and paramilitary operations whose purpose was to sow a climate of fear and panic through the targeting of civilians.
28. The most notorious example [of extolling terrorism against Palestinians] was Leon Uris' 1958 novel Exodus, a celebration of Zionist paramilitaries inspired in part by Sharon's exploits (and chiefly by [Yitzhak] Rabin). Of non-existent literary merit, Uris' work exceeded the influence of Gone With the Wind as a romantic defense of ethnic aggrandizement. (p. 154)
29. ... to look in depth at the Israeli relation to terror does tend to vitiate the obsessive harping on Palestinian terror. (p. 155)
30. ... the bad conscience of Zionism moves in the opposite direction, to join the cycle of vengeance that stains human history... who could have foretold back then [1948] just how cruel and coldly malevolent would be the direction given to Israeli state aggression by the bad conscience? (pp. 158-159)
31. The liberal Zionist tries to solve the riddles of bad conscience by squaring the circle. He returns to the same starting point, of Jewish ethnocracy, only he has provided it with a more enduring and less episodic basis than the state terrorist. (p. 161)
32. We would hold in this regard that Zionism became profoundly racist once it achieved its state, nor can it ever cease being racist so long as the Jewish state is its necessary expression; that the basis structure of Zionist racism is set forth by the bad conscience; and that the racist character of Israel constitutes its most basic indictment, that it is state-structured racism. (p. 163)
33. ... Zionism has woven an amazing web of deception to conceal its racism and evade the linkage with South African apartheid. (p. 165)
34. In their construction of a Jewish state the founders of Israel drew upon centuries of experience in rabbinical obfuscation. In contrast to apartheid South Africa, which attempted to clothe its racism with utopian rhetoric, the Zionist state devised regulations to show that it was not racist at all. (p. 167)
35. Think of how much better the "great American democracy" would be if it were to begin to confront its murderous past -- one sign of which would be to build a great museum about the annihilation of indigenous cultures, and another one on the slave trade and its consequence, alongside, or even, haven forfend, instead of the Holocaust museum, which deflects attention from America's lost history. (p. 191)
36. The notion of a "democratic Jewish state" is ipso facto racist. (p. 206)
37. [South African] Prime Minister John Vorster, whom the British had interned for Nazi sympathies, paid Israel a state visit in 1976 and was toasted by [Yitzhak] Rabin for "the ideals shared by Israel and South Africa; the hopes for justice and peaceful coexistence." A few months later, South Africa officially stated that "Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples." (p. 212)
38. Many senior Israeli officials came to believe that the Jewish state could not have survived without the support and financial aid of apartheid South Africa -- all during a period when Israel was manifestly opposing apartheid. (p. 212)
39. With the unending condition of crisis dictated by its internal contradictions, the Jewish state, obsessed with a "security" that will never come, expresses its inner being in the constant, unrelenting devouring of what is not Jewish. Within this context the "Two-State" option becomes for Zionism a necessary idiocy, and has been so from 1947 right through to George W. Bush's "roadmap," the latest flap with Hamas, and the now victorious Kadima Party, which in early 2006 talked about tucking in the borders of the state by lopping off a few impracticable settler communities from the West Bank while retaining IDF presence where they have stood. (p. 215)
40. ... Israel will always be aware that its giant patron can abandon it as swiftly as it has taken it under its wing once strategic considerations of internal politics change. (p. 216)
41. Thus the Two-State notion is essentially a code word for the maintenance of the status quo. Within Israeli discourse the notion of "Two-State" simply means, then, the continued aggrandizement of the Jewish state along with a more or less negligible "other state" on an ever shrinking fragment of land.  (p. 217)
42. On the other hand, the bringing down of Zionism and the entire imperial attitude it serves has tremendous potential for reversing the Islamic-fundamentalist tide, which principally defines itself in reaction to Western interventionism. (p. 218)
43. So long as Israel remains Zionist, there will never be a viable Two-State resolution. (p. 218)
44. By 1958, [Martin] Buber had washed his hands of the one-state idea and said so at a lecture: "I have accepted as mine the state of Israel, the form of the new Jewish community that has arisen from the war. I have nothing in common with those Jews who imagine that they may contest the factual shape which Jewish independence has taken." (p. 219)
45. [Mutual recognition] is a recovery of memory that is also a recognition of history -- the recognition Benny Morris couldn't stand when he turned away from the truth he had uncovered about the [Nakba], and toward his nihilist and paranoid defense of Zionism. (p. 241)

 

Sphere: Related Content

Civil Rights for Some Americans

US Commission on Civil Rights Serves Jewish Privilege: An E-Mail Exchange with Abigail Thernstrom

Is a Civil Rights Commissioner fit to serve that cannot acknowledge Jewish/ethnic Ashkenazi racism, extremism and biogtry as a major if not the main threat to civil rights in America today?

From U.S. Commission on Civil Rights - Commissioner Thernstrom

ABIGAIL THERNSTROM
Vice-Chair
Senior Fellow, Manhattan Institute
New York City, New York
POLITICAL AFFILIATION: INDEPENDENT

Abigail Thernstrom is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute in New York, a member of the Massachusetts State Board of Education, and a commissioner on the United States Commission on Civil Rights. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Government, Harvard University, in 1975.

---

E-Mails

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April 12, 2007

Dear Professor Thernstrom,

If you could pass this email along to your wife, I would be most grateful.

I saw the following item in the news.

U.S. Commission on Civil Rights to Launch Website against Campus Antisemitism
Published in: PRNewswire-USNewswire April 10, 2007

WASHINGTON, April 10 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ - On Friday, April 13, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights will launch a Web site that contributes to ending campus anti-Semitism by educating college students and others about anti-Semitism, urging victims and witnesses of anti-Semitism to report such incidents, and listing sources of assistance for students. This Web site is part of a campaign that the Commission undertook following the occurrence of anti-Semitic incidents on many of the nation's university and college campuses and receiving testimony from a panel of experts that too many college students are unaware of their rights and protections against anti-Semitic behavior. Campaign materials include the Commission's recent report Campus Anti-Semitism (http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/081506campusantibrief07.pdf ), and posters, postcards, and e-messages that will direct students to the Web site.

When: Friday, April 13, 2007, 9:30 a.m.
Where: U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 624 Ninth Street NW, Room 540
Washington, D.C.

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is an independent, bipartisan agency charged with monitoring federal civil rights enforcement. Members include Chairman Gerald A. Reynolds, Vice Chairman Abigail Thernstrom, and Commissioners Jennifer C. Braceras, Gail Heriot, Peter N. Kirsanow, Arlan D. Melendez, Ashley L. Taylor, Jr., and Michael Yaki. Kenneth L. Marcus is Staff Director. Commission meetings are
open to the media and general public.

SOURCE U.S. Commission on Civil Rights

I have been monitoring Harvard for many years for both Islamophobia and anti-Semitism. I know that Summers considered Divestment from Israel anti-Semitic in effect if not in intent, but he has some problems when the topic of Israel arises.

I know of no genuine incidents of anti-Semitism at Harvard, but Arabophobia and Islamophobia are quite commonly expressed often at the incite[ment] of the David Project and similar or related Israel advocacy organizations that operate on campus. Harvard is also in violation of the precedent of Bob Jones vs. USA in a very major way (something that should be extremely embarrassing because Professor Tribe played such a large role in the pleadings before the Supreme Court).

The US Commission on Civil Rights should seriously think about monitoring Islamophobia and Arabophobia incitement on campus and the very un-American ideological program with which such hatred is associated.

The article attached below provides a framework for addressing the problem.

Sincerely yours,

Joachim Martillo

The article entitled "The Significance of the AJC Attack on Progressive Jews" can be found at http://www.eaazi.org/ThorsProvoni/JewishPolitics/AJCattacks.htm .

Here is the critical section.

In order to be truly certain to block this "Muslim-liberal coalition," of which there is yet actually little evidence in the USA (it is more developed in the UK), these Jewish communal and Zionist organizations are trying to incite a form of Islamophobia on the model of Central and Eastern European Judeophobia or anti-Semitism of the late 18th through the middle 20th century. Here are some of the activities associated with this ongoing and expanding program.

1. Robert Spencer, who is author of Islam Unveiled as well as a frequent speaker at meetings and lectures to incite Islamophobia (see http://tinyurl.com/2uqqo8), and his ilk, who are generally well-funded by fanatic Zionist and Jewish Neocon organizations like the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, are scribbling these ridiculous books that are poor imitations of Eisenmenger's Entdecktes Judentum (Judaism Unmasked) or Rohling's Der Talmudjude (The Talmud Jew).
2. Too many (often Jewish) pseudo-scholars are babbling ignorantly about taqiyya (prudence), which is a permissible form of dissimulation in certain life threatening situations according to certain Shiite jurists. The concept has an exact counterpart in the thinking of the Rambam (Moses Maimonides or Musa bin Maimun, see his Letter on Martyrdom/Forced Apostasy, whose original Arabic uses the word taqiyya to describe exactly the same form of deception permitted to Jews subjected to certain forms of mortal danger).
   
   The concept of taqiyya also has a very close analogue in Roman Catholic ethics.
   
   The accusation that Muslims practice taqiyya to justify lying to non-Muslims is essentially equivalent to the common anti-Semitic slander that asserts that Jews never keep their contracts with non-Jews because the Kol nidrei prayer, which is part of the ceremony of Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) nullifies all such agreements.
   
3. Articles like Alain Besançon's "What Kind of Religion is Islam?," which appeared the May 2004 issue of Commentary, argue for a fundamental opposition between Islam and Judeochristianity. Such scholarly and non-scholarly literature represents a phenomenon essentially identical to the extensive 19th and 20th century literature that claims an unbridgeable gulf exists between Judaism and Christianity (Judentum und Christentum or sometimes Judentum und Deutschtum) in order to assert that Muslims today or Jews then are/were fundamentally alien to mainstream Western culture and must be removed. (See http://tinyurl.com/3yhv2m for a much less sinister hypothesis of the relationships among Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.)
   
4. Racist Neocon Islamophobes portray Islamic finance as something sinister just as 19th and 20th century anti-Semites depicted Jewish bankers as malicious and exploitive. "Playing by Islamofacist rules" (http://tinyurl.com/yuyex2) by Alex Alexiev is typical of this sort of defamation. Alexiev is the VP for Research at the extremist Neocon Zionist Center for Security Policy.
   
5. Arabophobes are using the international imperative to decrease consumption of fossil fuels to engage in a form of anti-Arab incitement that is modeled on traditional 1890s-1930s anti-Semitic cartoons, which gave the viewer a choice between trading at a small neighborhood shop belonging to a virtuous German Christian and buying from a giant department store owned by a sinister German Jew (see The Economist, "Green American," Jan. 27th - Feb. 2nd, 2007, p. 24, http://tinyurl.com/2lpeg2).

[Note how much the above billboard advertisement depends on reflexive racism. Maybe the guy on the left is some price-gouging Texas oil billionaire while the guy on the right is an Arab American humanitarian that is farming in Missouri.]

6. Jewish Neocons model phrases like the "War on Terror" or "Islamic terror" on 1920s - 1940s anti-Semitic terminology like jüdisch-bolschewistische Terrorbanden (Judeo-Bolshevik terror groups).

7. Zionist pseudo-scholars and media pundits have used two minor historical footnotes, to wit,
   
   1. Egyptian Kings Fuad I's and Farouk's flirtation with the idea of inheriting the Ottoman Caliphate and
   2. the angry reaction of the Ali brothers and other Indian Muslims
      i. to the abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate and
      ii. to the indifference that the British government showed toward the opinions of Muslim subjects

as the basis for crafting an Islamophobic fantasy comparable to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion or to the German Nazi propaganda about the jüdisch-bolschewistische Weltverschwörung (Judeo-Bolshevik world conspiracy).

In reality, polling data consistently shows the vast majority of Muslims (from the least to the most religious) have about as much interest in a restored Caliphate (or Imamate from the Shiite standpoint) as Jews have in being ruled by the Davidic House, for whose restoration Orthodox Jews beseech God daily according to the traditional Jewish prayer book.

In general, whereas Schoenfeld and the AJC as well as Abraham Foxman and the ADL (http://tinyurl.com/2753nw, http://tinyurl.com/2csatr) advocate restrictions on democracy and freedom of expression in the USA, American Muslims oppose the antidemocratic aspects of the Patriot Act, and Muslims outside the USA desire democratic reforms for their countries along with greater scope for freedom of expression.

8. Islamophobic Zionist organizations reward both ex-Muslims like Nonie Darwish, Ibn Warraq or Ayaan Hirsi Ali (http://tinyurl.com/2mn43z) and also self-described Muslim reformers like Irshad Manji for writing exposés of Islam or for lecturing on the need for Islamic reform in exactly the same way that Czarist Russian organizations used to pay government-anointed Jewish reformers to encourage change within the Russian Jewish community or would support Russian Orthodox Jewish converts, who were willing to tell "the truth about Judaism."

9. Fanatic Jewish Zionists like Melanie Phillips (author of Londonistan), Nidra Poller (author of "Betrayed by Europe: An Expatriate's Lament," http://tinyurl.com/2plbab), Giselle Littman (author of Eurabia under the pen name Bat Ye'or), and Bernard Lewis (see http://tinyurl.com/2bm9bp) are scare-mongering the Islamization or Arabization of Europe just as Henry Ford ranted about the Judaization of the USA in The International Jew and just as numerous Central and Eastern European anti-Semites denounced the Judaization of Vienna, Berlin, Warsaw or Łódź.

10. The organized Jewish community is attempting to make the denial of the Holocaust of popular discourse today the equivalent of denying the divinity of Jesus within traditional Christian Judeophobic discourse. The similarity of these two cardinal "sins" is particularly striking because scholarly discussion of the mass murder of Jews during WW2 like scholarly discussion of the historical Jesus during the 19th and 20th century differs massively from the popular conceptualization in both cases (see http://tinyurl.com/3dj6ob).
    
    
11. Various groups within the organized Jewish community or sponsored by it are churning out Islamophobic and Arabophobic movies that look more and more like German Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda films. Obsession, radical Islam's war against the West (http://www.obsessionthemovie.com/) and Columbia Unbecoming from the David Project (http://www.columbiaunbecoming.com/) are examples of this growing cinematic genre designed to incite anti-Muslim and anti-Arab prejudice.
    
    
12. The media and legal persecution of Muslim Arab Americans like Sami el-Arian (see http://tinyurl.com/3doa6g), Muslim American organizations like Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (see http://tinyurl.com/ysp5gt) or the Islamic Society of Boston (see http://tinyurl.com/yayd4n), and Muslim American converts like former US Army Captain James Yee (see his book For God and Country: Faith and Patriotism under Fire), José Padilla (see http://tinyurl.com/2v6mya, http://tinyurl.com/2nkrck) or Daniel Maldonado (see http://tinyurl.com/2rvwgs) is beginning to look like an attempt to create the sort of suspicion and hostility against Muslims that the Dreyfus Affair engendered specifically against French Jews and then contagiously against all Jews in general.
    
    
13. Not even a reworking of Nazi biological determinist or social Darwinist anti-Semitic arguments has been beyond the pale in the oeuvres of today's Islamophobes. Edward Rothstein, who often serves as a Jewish Zionist media gatekeeper at the New York Times, used the publication of Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel C. Dennett as an excuse to equate Muslims protesting vicious anti-Islamic xenophobia with ants whose brains have been eaten by parasites. His February 20, 2006 article is entitled "History Illuminates the Rage of Muslims." (See http://tinyurl.com/yrjncm).
    
    
14. Classic anti-Semites in the past and today's cutting-edge Islamophobes have striven for a normalization of their hatred via a form of deflection. When criticized by Americans for mistreatment of Jews, German Nazis and their supporters would refocus the discussion onto Jim Crow in the American South. Today, Zionists and their supporters set up organizations like Save Darfur or the American Anti-Slavery Group (see http://tinyurl.com/344gxh) to distract Americans and other Westerners from Zionist crimes against humanity (see http://tinyurl.com/2d6gey). Before Zionists thought of using current human rights issues to manipulate discourse about the conflict over Palestine, they tried to obfuscate the discussion of the Zionist genocide of Palestinians by referencing the mistreatment of native Americans by European colonists and their descendants.


The pattern outlined above is not only despicable, but it is also shamelessly clear. The purveyors of this sort of Islamophobia on steroids have a very clear goal to marginalize Western Muslims so drastically so that no respectable political group and especially that no progressives would ever have any association with American Muslims whatsoever — except, of course, for those vile and contemptible Jewish anti-Semites so graciously identified by the AJC.

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April 13, 2007

Dear Joachim Martillo:

My husband and I share his email, and so I got your message without any need to pass it on to me.

You should write to the staff director and ask him to forward your letter on to all other commissioners. Just write what you wrote to me. And tell him I suggested you write directly and suggested he send it around.

He is Kenneth Marcus kmarcus@usccr.gov

Thanks for getting in touch,

AT

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April 19, 2007

Dear Mr. Martillo:

When I suggested you send your email to Kenneth Marcus, I had not had the time to read it. I did no more than glance at it to see the subject and, on that basis, decided the staff director was the right person to contact.

But, having now read it with a bit more care, I see your message that "concerned Americans must begin seriously to consider whether fanatic and extremist Jewish Americans, more committed to Zionism than either to their fellow Americans or to basic human decency, should continue to play important roles in US media, academia and politics." Moreover, you characterize the American Jewish Committee and Commentary magazine as "un-American" and "subversive."

I would never have suggested you contact the staff director had I noticed what you had actually written. I suspect I am in the category of "fanatic and extremist Jewish Americans" myself.

Sorry for leading you astray; I am always short on time and should have taken a few minutes to read what you wrote. Lesson learned.

AT

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April 19, 2007

Dear Professor Thernstrom,

Have been following the changes in the AJC over the last few years?

The David Project, whose founding president Charles Jacobs, is probably involved in a criminal conspiracy to prevent Muslim American citizens from exercising their Constitutional and civil rights (see http://tinyurl.com/28n4x7, http://tinyurl.com/2dxcyg), testified at the US Commission on Civil Rights and recently shared the podium at the ZOA with Kenneth Marcus if I am not mistaken. If Jacobs is really interested in strengthening civil rights, he should stop trying to undermine them.

David Harris, president of the AJC, is supporting Jacobs and the David Project. One of the directors of the local chapter of the AJC quit over this issue.

You probably do not remember me, but I have taken classes from you. I simply do not believe that you would enter into a conspiracy to deprive either Muslim or non-Muslim American citizens of their Constitutional and civil right as Jacobs and his friends are doing. Maybe, I am wrong, but I have been studying the Boston Jewish community for years, and you simply do not belong to Jacobs' extremist and racist segment of the American Jewish population.

I generally have many disagreements with Bernard Lewis, but I have heard that he has come around to my opinion that current Islamophobia is beginning to look more and more like classic anti-Semitism of the late 19th century and first half of the twentieth century. He is supposed to be writing a book on the subject. I do not know whether he agrees with me that an identifiable class within the organized Jewish community is consciously trying to craft Islamophobia according to the mold of classic anti-Semitism, but his specialty is Turkish and Middle Eastern studies while mine is Jewish studies.

As far as I know, there are no suggestions that any institution of higher learning is violating the principles of Bob Jones vs. USA with regard to Jews, but if Harvard is doing it with respect to Arabs, probably other universities are as well. Yet, the US Commission on Civil Rights is setting up a web site to monitor anti-Semitism. Something seems wrong with the priorities.

I wrote the article The AJC attacks! (http://tinyurl.com/ytjojg) because most of the people Rosenfeld condemned are friends of mine. Now I do not have problems if a debate becomes heated, but I can make a good case that the AJC is attempting to shut down the discussion and is getting close to working to undermine freedom of expression for people, who the leaders of the AJC believe disagree with the organization's position on Israel. The possibility that American Muslims might begin to influence US politics with regard to Israel seems to lie at the core of the Roxbury Mosque conflict. The David Project is not a Jewish communal organization per se but states that its mission is Israel advocacy.

As for Commentary, which until January 2007 was published by the AJC, can you characterize as a passage like

...in the judgment of the political scientist Peter Skerry, we may now be witnessing the emergence of a new force in American politics. Writing in Time, and citing a whole range of such convergent interests, Skerry calls this a "Muslim-liberal coalition" (more accurately it might be called a Muslim/Arab-liberal coalition). If he is right, and if this coalition can be organized to act with any degree of coherence, it could indeed end up, through sheer numbers alone, wielding a disproportionate influence on American politics [my emphasis], to the clear detriment of the interests of American Jews.

as anything but subversive and un-American? [Note that Schoenfeld is a contributor to Commentary, and this passage is not exceptional.] Do you disagree that majority rule in theory is an intrinsic element of the American system? In the US political system we normally think of the exercise of influence by sheer numbers as proportionate not disproportionate.

Are you having a problem with my characterization because the AJC is a Jewish organization, because Commentary is supposed to be a Jewish intellectual magazine, and you yourself are Jewish? Arab and Muslim organizations like CAIR, MPAC or the AAI are subject to this sort of scrutiny all the time. Yet, Walt and Mearsheimer's (by my standards ) very unsophisticated analysis suggests that certain Jewish or Zionist organizations might unlike CAIR, MPAC or the AAI be genuine threats to American interests and the American political system.

Should the US Commission on Civil Rights be renamed the US Commission on Civil Rights for Some Americans?

Sincerely yours,

Joachim Martillo

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Summary

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In retrospect, I have to accept Abigail Thernstrom's characterization of herself as being "in the category of 'fanatic and extremist Jewish Americans.'"

She is a Jewish bigot unable to see Jewish bigotry. She has no legitimate place on the US Commission on Civil Rights.

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