In a message dated 04/07/08 16:12:21 Eastern Daylight Time, davidrolde@comcast.net writes:
1. Joachim, Do you really need to associate me with your anti-Soviet Union stuff?
I reported truthfully that "at the beginning of the twentieth century significant numbers of gedolei baTorah (Torah sages) like Rav Elkhonon Wasserman predicted that just such a disastrous outcome would result because of Jewish involvement with Soviet Communism and Zionism." (See Comment about Rav Wasserman.)
I really do not address issues of support for or opposition to the Soviet Union.
I am interested in issues of (secular Ashkenazi) identity among Jews in the Soviet leadership.
If you believe that the Soviet Union was a good idea, you might want to investigate why it failed. Was there an aspect of the manipulation of Soviet policy for the sake of Jewish special interest as perceived by some Soviet Jewish leaders? If there was, did it harm the Soviet Union and cause the Soviet Union to undertake misguided policies? Materials that have become available since the opening of Soviet archives suggest that genuinely committed Soviet Jewish and non-Jewish leaders became concerned about a faction within the Soviet hierarchy pursuing ethnic interests especially in manipulating the Soviet Union to recognize the new State of Israel. Such concern may explain the execution of Yiddish writers in 1952 (Itche Goldberg, Yiddish Advocate, 102, Dies - New York Times) as well as various other purges of Jews throughout the Soviet leadership after 1948. Many believe the United States of America suffers from precisely this phenomenon. (See The Real Origins of Neocons and My Country Needs Jewish Liberals to Expose Neocons as a Jewish 'Special Interest'.) Why do you cling to pro-Americanism? (Your family picture on your blog says you are "pro-America") The "USA" is an evil racist genocidal project that is destroying the world. It cannot be separated from Zionism and redeemed.
I specifically wrote pro-America because I did not want to suggest that I support the US government. There are many good Americans, and I see nothing wrong in supporting them.
There were decades of American imperialist anti-Soviet propaganda. It is not right to blindly believe it.
The Jewish-Zionist lobby in the US disseminated a lot of anti-Soviet propaganda.
A lot of Hollywood people, who later became extremist Zionists, released a lot of pro-Soviet films. (See Red Star Over Hollywood: The Film Colony's Long Romance with the Left by Ronald Radosh for some less than objective discussion of the issue.)
I am simplifying, but it would not be incorrect to assert that Dalton Trumbo, who was blacklisted in effect for pro-Soviet activities, received general license to work again in Hollywood in exchange for scripting Exodus.
This is an important point now, not just an historical point. The cold war is not over. "US" imperialist liberal and conservative lying propagandists, including Jewish Zionist groups, are currently demonizing China with phony "human rights" rhetoric. Remember Jewish Zionist billionaire George Soros's Human Rights Watch organization was formed in order to attack the Soviet Union and countries allied with the Soviet Union.
This politics is more complex than you admit. The Neoconservatives at Commentary frequently attack Soros, whose relationship to the Jewish community and the State of Israel is at the very least ambiguous. While there may be some hypocrisy in his current stance after so much profiteering, he has attacked the application of Friedmanite Shock Doctrine in the privatization of publicly owned Eastern European companies. Whatever game he is playing, it seems independent of the normal Zionist political economic elites.
The "human rights" rhetoric has been extended to attack Muslim countries, but it is still used by Zionist-imperialists to attack non-Muslim countries, as well as Muslim countries, that refuse to completely capitulate to "US"/Zionist/"UK"/French international monopoly capital's control over everything. Iran, Sudan, Venezuela, Cuba, Korea, Zimbabwe, Myanmar, Pakistan, Syria, etc. - all are under imperialist attack using a propaganda paradigm that was developed by Zionist Jews to attack and destroy the Soviet Union.
Zionist Jews were mostly concerned with poisoning human rights discourse in order to prevent it from being used against Israel and not in order to attack and destroy the Soviet Union. Neocon Jabotinskians during the period of action on behalf of Soviet Refusenik tended to argue that Soviet Jews suffered uniquely from anti-Semitism within the Soviet Union and cared little about discrimination against other groups within the Soviet Union.
While there is some overlap with Neocon Jabotinskians, the anti-totalitarian pro-human rights discourse typically originated with Neoliberal Friedmanites like Kirkpatrick, who confused freedom with free market looting of developing nations.
The distinction may seem to be more pipul or quodlibet, but it is necessary to understanding both the current political and economic situation in the USA.
Article about origins of Human Rights Watch at:
Links about JCRC and other Jewish groups' involvement in anti-USSR propaganda from the 1940s on:
2. I don't know what Finkelstein actually believes in his head. He may secretly agree with Michael Lerner (or even with Jabotinsky) or he may not. But I haven't heard Finkelstein argue that Jews are morally entitlted to affirmative action. He actually argues the opposite. But then he argues for a Zionist "solution" in Palestine on pragmatic grounds. I find it very frustrating trying to quantify Finkelstein's good work (on pointing out that Jews are not morally entitled to Palestine at all AND on exposing Zionist propaganda strategies AND on exposing the Zionist regime's atrocities) and Finkelstein's counterproductive work (claiming that the pragmatic situation requires Palestinians to give up most of Palestine) to decide if his influence is overall good or bad. In his speech this year at MIT, Finkelstein did not appear to have changed his positions, but he did concentrate more on his problematic positions and less on his useful work than he did the other times I have seen him speak. He may also have been more anti-resistance this time than in past speeches, or maybe he was always anti-resistance.
I equate the position of the pragmatic Finkelstein with the idealistic Lerner because I heard all varieties of this sort of argument during the US civil rights campaigns during the 60s. Back then all the arguments meant that whites were to maintain racist privileges over African Americans, and the revived arguments just mean that Jews will keep racist privileges over Palestinians.
Anyway thank you for posting my reportback from the Finkelstein talk.
Reporting the state of intellectual discourse over Palestine is important.
Again I just don't like the anti-Soviet stuff.
But it wasn't there, and I do not have an interest in anti-Sovietism. There are probably many possible workable poverty-minimizing economic systems for humanity, and whatever criticism I might make of Marx's ideas, they never reached the level of ridiculousness of the mathematics that Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman used to support his free-market theory.
I once asked a former Soviet mathematician about discrimination against Jews in the Soviet Union.
He laughed at me. He told me that there were approximately 200 in his division at the University of Moscow in the Soviet period.
Of the 98%, who were officially non-Jewish on Soviet identity papers, only he and another colleague actually had no known Jewish ancestry.
I subsequently verified the claim. The Refusenik movement was simply a scam that Neocons used to practice the manipulation of Congress. (See The Real Origins of the Neocons.) So again I feel it is important not to spout imperialist propaganda against America's enemies. The allegations of "Jewish control" of the Soviet Union are about events in the 1920s and 30s. After World War 2, Jewish organizations were mostly opposed to the Soviet Union. With the amount of Jewish and American demonization of the Soviet Union and Russia over the past century, I cannot go along with throwing around accusations of "genocide" against any Soviet Union or Russian (or other Eastern European) government. What about the 4 million Koreans the "Americans" killed in the early 1950s? What about the 800,000 Philipinos that "Americans" killed in the late 19th century?
~ David
Preface
by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)
I placed the original announcement of Norman Finkelstein's visit to MIT below after David Rolde's report.
I fixed some minor typos and added two words to increase clarity.
Finkelstein appears to have moved closer to the position of Rabbi Lerner of Tikkun Magazine.
Lerner makes the self-serving argument that Zionism is justified as affirmative action for the Jewish people, who have suffered centuries of persecution in addition to the Holocaust.
Yet, the Polish Jewish revolutionary socialist leader Rosa Luxemburg at the beginning of the twentieth century could discern no specifically Jewish suffering in historic Poland, and generally historians (except those in Jewish studies) identify the Polish peasants as the most oppressed population in post-partition Poland.
In fact, for the last several hundred years the vast majority of Jews have had higher incomes, more education and longer life-spans that the non-Jews among whom they lived while from approximately 1850 until approximately 1950 Central and Eastern European Jews were heavily involved in extremist political movements and often took leading roles in assassination, terrorism, mass murder, ethnic cleansing and genocide. (See Followup (II): Origins of Modern Jewry and Jewish, Zionist War Against Salvation.)
Not only does the Holocaust have the appearance of blowback for the outrageous behavior of far too many Jews in Central and Eastern Europe, but at the beginning of the twentieth century significant numbers of gedolei baTorah (Torah sages) like Rav Elkhonon Wasserman predicted that just such a disastrous outcome would result because of Jewish involvement with Soviet Communism and Zionism. (See Comment about Rav Wasserman.)
No reasonable system of ethics can justify giving license to Jews to steal Palestine from the native population of Palestine, and there is no reason whatsoever to believe that the unrepentant Zionist population will change its behavior even if the native Palestinian population gives up all claims to 80% of Palestine.
David Rolde's disappointment with Finkelstein's speech is completely understandable.
Two States: An International Consensus?
by David Rolde
A few of us went to see Norman Finkelstein speak at MIT last night. There was one guy wearing a yamulke standing at the door handing out anti-Finkelstein fliers that criticized Finkelstein as being a bad scholar and a "Holocaust denier". But the audience was quiet and there were no rightwing Zionist questions.
Finkelstein talked for a couple hours. He didn't say anything new that he didn't say last time I saw him a couple years ago. He did say some good things, but he concentrated more on his Zionistic stances of giving 80% of Palestine to the Zionists for a Jewish state and of discouraging the return of the Palestinian refugees.
Finkelstein claims there is an international consensus for a two-state solution. He went through international law arguments about why the Zionist entity is not entitled to continue to rule over the 1967-occupied territories, e.g., that "states" cannot legally acquire territory through war. He was clear that the Zionist settlements in the 67 territories are illegal.
He also reiterated his stance that Palestinian refugees do have a right to return, but maybe they should give up this right for a negotiated settlement.
Finkelstein compared himself to Palestinian refugees. He said
- that he had a right to tenure at DePaul [University] and could have won his case in court if he had wanted to spend his life in court for years but
- that he settled with DePauw [and]
- that they had to publicly say he is a good professor and also give him some money.
So based on his experience in giving up his "right to return" to DePaul he can understand how it might be possible for Palestinian refugees to give up their right of return too.
Finkelstein also spent some time on pointing out that all the wars that the Zionist entity has been involved in have been wars of aggression on the Zionists' part. He pointed out that the Zionist cluster bombing of southern Lebanon in 2006 was the most concentrated cluster bombing in history. In response to a question he went into some details about the 1973 "Yom Kippur" war - I'm not sure he got the details right, but at least he blamed the Zionists. He also did talk about the ethnic cleansing in 1948.
He also talked briefly about the Holocaust industry and about the myth of "the new anti-Semitism".
When Finkelstein ended the main part of his speech he asked for questions and asked for dissenters to ask questions first. I guess Finkelstein thought he would get rightwing Zionist dissenters. But the first questioner was a young Palestinian woman who challenged Finkelstein about his comparison of himself with Palestinian refugees on the basis that Palestinian refugees don't have as much privilege and options and power to negotiate from as Finkelstein has.
I was the second questioner. I asked Finkelstein basically the same question that I asked Rami Khouri at KSG on Saturday. Finkelstein had told us that "states" can't acquire territory through war. And he told us that the so-called "State of Israel" was established through war and ethnic cleansing. The UN partition resolution did not allot 80% of Palestine for the Jewish state and did not allow for transfer of populations. The partition resolution was not implemented. Instead the so-called "State of Israel" was established by war. So how are the Zionists entitled to 80% of Palestine? Finkelstein cut me off around this point and answered that yes the Zionists used war to acquire more of Palestine in 1948 than they were allotted, and that this is another example of preferential treatment for "Israel" and is the only time that the international community has legitimized territorial acquisition through war. He then tried to move on, but I blurted out the second part of my question which was how can Finkelstein say that there is an international consensus to allow Zionist rule of 80% of Palestine when millions of people in the Middle East and all over the world disagree. Finkelstein answered in a chiding way saying that he thinks it is important for people "on our side" to recognize the victory or achievement of getting the international community consensus on a two-state solution for Palestine.
Overall I was disappointed with Finkelstein's speech. If he would concentrate more on speaking about his work exposing the Holocaust industry and rightwing Zionist propaganda campaigns & the myth of "anti-Semitism" and on exposing Zionist crimes in the Middle East, that would be worthwhile. But this time he concentrated more on his proposal for a "solution" that is itself Zionist.
Original Announcement: Norman Finkelstein at MIT
| 
04.02.2008
Wednesday | | | |
Cambridge, MA | | | |
NAME OF SPONSORS: Arab Students Organization, Palestine@MIT, Muslim Students Association, GSC Funding Board, Latino Cultural Center, Social Justice Cooperative
PLACE:
MIT 6-120
For directions see here.
TIME:
6pm CONTACT:
tanwar[at] mit.edu 617-692-0.495 | |
| | | | |
|
|
Next Norman Finkelstein Speaking Engagement in the Boston Area
|
04.16.2008
Wednesday | | | |
Chestnut Hill, MA | | | |
Place:
Gasson Hall,
Room 305,
Boston College
Time:
4:30 pm
Contact:
Alexandra, saieh[at]bc.edu, (305) 733-5595 |
Click here for more Norman Finkelstein events.
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