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Thursday, July 31, 2008

Learning to Love Zionist Imperialism

How Americans Are Indoctrinated
by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

In 1960 Poul Anderson published a science fiction novel entitled The High Crusade, whose tag line is, "The fantastic chronicle of a medieval English village transported to an alien world."

The book is quite typical of its time period and shows the ongoing normalization of Zionist power in the minds of Americans long before the June 1967 war brought Israel to the forefront of American consciousness.

The story is framed by the first contact of an Earth spaceship with a vast interstellar imperium.

The story begins when a starship of the Wersgor Empire carries off medieval villagers and minor local English nobles. After a series of battles, the English defeat the Wersgor and impose a feudal order on the former Wersgorixan domains.

The book concludes by returning to the outer first contact frame:
The [Earth spaceship] captain put the pages aside and hurried out to the main airlock entrance. the ramp had been let down, and a red-haired human giant was striding up to greet him. Fantastically clad, bearing a florid ornamental sword, he also carried a businesslike blast gun. Behind him an honor guard of riflemen in Lincoln green stood at attention. Over their heads fluttered a banner with the arms of a cadet branch of the great Hameward family.

The captain's hand was engulfed in a hairy ducal paw. The sociotech translated a distorted English: "At last! God be praised, they've finally learned to build spaceships on Old Earth! Welcome, good sir!"

"But why did you never find us ... er ... your grace?" stammered the captain. When it had been translated, the duke shrugged and answered:

"Oh, we searched. For generations every young knight went looking for Earth, unless he chose to look for the Holy Grail. But you know how bloody many suns there are. And even more toward the center of the galaxy -- where we encountered still other starfaring peoples. Commerce, exploration, war, everything drew us inward, away from this thinly starred spiral arm. You realize this is only a poor outlying province you've come upon. The King and the Pope dwell away off in the Seventh Heaven ... Finally the quest petered out. In past centuries, Old Earth has become little more than a tradition." His big face beamed. "But now it's all turned topsy-turvy. You found us! Most wonderful! Tell me at once, has the Holy Land been liberated from the paynim?"

"Well," said Captain Yeshu haLevy, who was a loyal citizen of the Israeli Empire, "yes."


"Too bad. I'd have loved a fresh crusade. Life's been dull since we conquered the Dragons ten years ago. They way, however, that the royal expeditions to the Sagittarian star clouds have turned up some very promising planets -- But see here! You must come over to the castle. I'll entertain you as best as I can, and outfit you for the trip to the King. That's tricky navigation, but I'll furnish you with an astrologer who knows the way."

"Now what did he say?" asked Captain haLevy, when the bass burble had stopped.

The sociotech explained.

Captain haLevy turned fire color. "No astrologer is going to touch my ship!"

The sociotech sighed. He'd have a lot of work to do in the coming years.
Of course, Anderson is trying to end his story with an amusing but cheap joke. Yet, he could have achieved similar results without glorifying Zionism. I am puzzled by the use of the name Yeshu. Is Anderson perhaps directing a joke within a joke towards the Jews that dominate the American punishing industry?  Jews most typically use the name Yeshu in combination with haMamzer as in Yeshu haMamzer, which means Jesus the Bastard.

Jewish issues and -- after 1972 -- the Israeli-Palestinian conflict figure in some of Anderson's writings.

The Dromm mutants of Inside Straight (1955) may serve as a metaphor for modern Jews when a philosopher criticizes the Dromm race:
Unjust treatment is apt to produce paranoia in the victim. Your race has outlived its oppressors, but not the reflexes they built into your society. Your canalised nervous system make you incapable of regarding anyone else as anything but a dangerous enemy
Another Anderson story implicitly refers to the struggle over Palestine when Captain Ben-Yehuda forces a human colony to leave at gunpoint from a planet where the colonists had been living peacefully with the indigenous non-humans. When the humans try to explain that there is no conflict, the captain asks:
"Can you speak for your grandchildren and for their grandchildren, for generations which will grow more and more numerous and need more and more land? When my ancestors arrived in Palestine, they did not intend to dispossess the local Arabs and drive them into refugee camps - but in the end, that's what they did."
Obviously, Anderson had a far too generous understanding of Zionist objectives in colonizing Palestine.
book cover of 

The High Crusade 

by

Poul Anderson
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Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Report on Gazan Fulbright Scholars

Followup: Gazan Fulbright Scholar at Columbia

It appears that the "3 students were able to leave yesterday [July 29th]. It turned out that none of them was [a] terrorist." Sphere: Related Content

Monday, July 28, 2008

A Mosque in Need

History to Reclaim
 
The Harvard Pluralism Project just sent out the following alert:
Devastation at the Mother Mosque of America

[ Image: Mother Mosque of America flood ]

Floodwaters entered the oldest mosque in America in mid-June, sparing the main floor but destroying the ground floor area, which housed many of the mosque's books, artifacts, historical documents, old photos and filmed documentaries. The Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has organized a fundraiser to help raise money to repair the devastation at the mosque. For further information, or to donate to the recovery effort, please visit the Mother Mosque's website: http://www.mothermosque.org

It really isn't the Mother Mosque.

But by all means contribute to the Mosque's restoration.

Albanian and Polish Tatar Muslims built Mosques in the USA long before Arabs, Turks, and South Asians did.

From Mosques in the USA:

The first mosque in America was probably build by Albanian Muslims in 1915 in Maine. By 1919, they had established another mosque in Connecticut. Polish-speaking Tatars build a mosque in Brooklyn, NY in 1926, which is still in use. African American Muslims established the first Mosque in Pittsburgh, PA in 1930. The Lebanese Community of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, opened its first mosque in 1935. The State Street Mosque in New York City was established by Sheikh Dawood Ahmed Faisal in 1955. This mosque represents a special point in the development of the American Muslim community. The Dar-ul-Islam movement began from there.

The claim by Lebanese Muslims about the Mother Mosque seems to represent almost intentional forgetfulness

The Ottoman Empire was the pre-dominant Muslim power for centuries and the Ottoman elite consisted primarily of Slavic, Albanian, European Turkic, and Greek Muslims.

Polish Tatar Muslims constituted historically one of the most accomplished communities in E. Europe and were granted noble status within historic Poland in the fourteenth century.

The Polish Nobel Prize winner, Henryk Sienkiewicz, and the Hollywood actor, Charles Bronson, come from the Polish Tatar Muslim community.

The reluctance to admit that Eastern Europe has been the main center of Islam for the last four centuries or so parallels a similar reluctance to accept the primarily E. European nature and origin of Modern Rabbinic Judaism.

I tend to think of Medieval Judaism whether Karaite or Rabbinic as primarily Arab Islamic Judaism while I categorize Modern Rabbinic Judaism whether Karaite or Rabbinic as primarily E. European Roman Catholic/E. Orthodox Judaism.

In Why Study Yiddish Culture? I argue that studying Yiddish Culture is necessary to understanding Modern Europe. Likewise, I must argue that studying the Eastern European Islamic synthesis is necessary for understanding both modern Islam as well as E. Europe and therefore absolutely critical to comprehending the modern Western-Islamic synthesis.

 
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Barack Obama, Harry Truman, Berlin

Letter to Boston Globe Editor
 
Dear Editor,
 
Jacoby complains in "Missing from that Berlin speech" (July 27, 2008) that Obama did not mention Harry Truman during his speech in Berlin, but Obama probably deserves a pass on this omission.
 
In 1911 in a letter to his future wife, Elizabeth (Bess) Virginia Wallace, Truman wrote:

I think one man is just as good as another so long as he's not a nigger or a Chinaman. Uncle Will says that the Lord made a White man from dust, a nigger from mud, then He threw up what was left and it came down a Chinaman. He does hate Chinese and Japs. So do I. It is race prejudice, I guess. But I am strongly of the opinion Negroes ought to be in Africa, Yellow men in Asia and White men in Europe and America.

While Truman issued Executive Order 9981 on July 26, 1948 to end racial segregation in the US military, he was probably responding to the need for African American votes in the upcoming election.

Because Truman also needed Jewish electoral and financial support to win, he put into place the first of a series of misguided US foreign policy decisions practically guaranteed to engender hatred against the USA when he supported the establishment of the State of Israel by white Central and Eastern European colonists against the democratic will of the majority native Palestinian population. By Truman's standards Palestinians almost certainly simply constituted another class of niggers, about whom Truman did not have to be concerned because unlike African Americans they did not vote in US elections.

Because Jacoby scare-mongers Islamofascism just as Neoconservative policy-makers scare-mongered Iraqi WMDs, Jacoby is concerned that Obama's opposition to Bush's war against Iraq might correlate with comparable skepticism about some of Truman's policies or choices in the Middle East. We should all be glad if President Obama turns out to be no Harry Truman.


Joachim Martillo
Boston, MA 02126-2813

 

Missing from that Berlin speech

BARACK OBAMA had ample reason to recall the Berlin Airlift of 1948 during his dramatic speech in the German capital last week. The airlift was an early and critical success for the West in the Cold War, with clear relevance to our own time, the war in Iraq, and the free world's conflict with radical Islam. But having reached back 60 years to that pivotal hour of American leadership, Obama proceeded to draw from it exactly the wrong lessons.

The Soviet Union had blockaded western Berlin on June 24, 1948, choking off access to the city by land and water and threatening 2.5 million people with starvation. Moscow was determined to force the United States and its allies out of Berlin. To capitulate to Soviet pressure, as Obama rightly noted, "would have allowed Communism to march across Europe." Yet many in the West advocated retreat, fearing that the only way to keep the city open was to use the atomic bomb - and launch World War III.

For President Truman, retreat was unthinkable. "We stay in Berlin, period," he decreed. Overriding the doubts of senior advisers, including Secretary of State George C. Marshall and General Omar Bradley, the Army Chief of Staff, Truman ordered the Armed Forces to begin supplying Berlin by air.

Military planners initially thought that with a "very big operation," they might be able to get 700 tons of food to Berlin. Within weeks, the Air Force was flying in twice that amount every day, as well as supplies of coal.

"Pilots and crew were making heroic efforts," David McCullough recorded in his sweeping biography of Truman. "At times planes were landing as often as every four minutes - British Yorks and Dakotas, America C-47s and the newer, much larger, four-engine C-54s . . . Ground crews worked round the clock. "We were proud of our Air Force during the war. We're prouder of it today," said The New York Times.

Yet the pressure to abandon Berlin persisted. The CIA argued that the airlift had worsened matters by "making Berlin a major test of US-Soviet strength" and affirming "direct US responsibility" for West Berlin. The airlift was bound to fail, the intelligence analysts warned. Truman didn't waver. "We'll stay in Berlin - come what may," he wrote in his diary on July 19. "I don't pass the buck, nor do I alibi out of any decision I make."

It would take nearly a year and more than 277,000 flights. But in the end it was the Soviets who backed down. On May 12, 1949, the blockade ended - a triumph of American prowess and perseverance, and a momentous vindication for Truman.

But not once in his Berlin speech did Obama acknowledge Truman's fortitude, or even mention his name. Nor did he mention the US Air Force, or the 31 American pilots who died during the airlift.

Indeed, Obama seemed to go out of his way not to say plainly that what saved Berlin in that dark time was America's military might. Save for a solitary reference to "the first American plane," he never described one of the greatest American operations of the postwar period as an American operation at all. He spoke only of "the airlift," "the planes," "those pilots." Perhaps their American identity wasn't something he cared to stress amid all his "people of the world" salutations and talk of "global citizenship."

"People of the world," Obama declaimed, "look at Berlin, where a wall came down, a continent came together, and history proved that there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one." But the world didn't stand as one during the Cold War; it was riven by an Iron Curtain. For more than four decades, America and the West confronted an implacable enemy on the other side of that divide. What finally defeated that enemy and ended the Cold War was not harmony and goodwill, but American strength and resolve.

Obama's speech was a paean to international cooperation. "Now is the time to join together," he said. "It was this spirit that led airlift planes to appear in the sky above our heads." No - it was a Democratic president named Truman, who had the audacity to order an airlift when others counseled retreat, and the grit to see it through when others were ready to withdraw.

Sixty years later, it is a very different kind of Democrat who is running for president. Obama may have wowed 'em in Berlin, but he's no Harry Truman.

Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jacoby@globe.com. 

 

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Saturday, July 26, 2008

Gazan Fulbright Scholar at Columbia

Lee Bollinger's Selective Boycott Opposition
by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)
 
When human rights organizations took a stand against Israeli human rights violations by using techniques borrowed from the anti-Apartheid campaign, Columbia President Lee Bollinger declared any attempt to limit the access of Israeli academic institutions to British universities to be "utterly antithetical to the fundamental values of the academy, where we will not hold intellectual exchange hostage to the political disagreements of the moment."
 
He added, "In seeking to quarantine Israeli universities and scholars [the] vote [of Britain's University and College Union] threatens every university committed to fostering scholarly and cultural exchanges that lead to enlightenment, empathy, and a much-needed international marketplace of ideas."
 
See below for Bollinger's entire statement.
 
So far the State of Israel has refused to give permission to three Gazan Fulbright Scholars to travel to the USA. One of them is supposed to attend Columbia in the fall.
 
Please write President Bollinger (bollinger@columbia.edu). Here is my letter.

Dear President Bollinger,
 
You have taken the lead to support international access of Israeli scholars and academic institutions with your June 12, 2007 Statement on British University and College Union Boycott
 
The State of Israel is attempting to enforce a quarantine of Gazan Palestinian scholars and thereby "threatens every university committed to fostering scholarly and cultural exchanges that lead to enlightenment, empathy, and a much-needed international marketplace of ideas."
 
Because of your public stand do you not now have the ethical obligation today to inform the American and Israeli academic communities that you are rethinking your opposition to the boycott of Israeli educational institutions and scholars -- especially because one of the quarantined Gazans is supposed to start at Columbia in the fall?
 
The State of Israel owes you, and I cannot think of a more effective way to compel the Israeli government to give the remaining three scholars permission to depart for the USA.
 
Sincerely yours,
 
Joachim Martillo

June 12, 2007

As a citizen, I am profoundly disturbed by the recent vote by Britain's new University and College Union to advance a boycott against Israeli academic institutions. As a university professor and president, I find this idea utterly antithetical to the fundamental values of the academy, where we will not hold intellectual exchange hostage to the political disagreements of the moment. In seeking to quarantine Israeli universities and scholars this vote threatens every university committed to fostering scholarly and cultural exchanges that lead to enlightenment, empathy, and a much-needed international marketplace of ideas.

At Columbia I am proud to say that we embrace Israeli scholars and universities that the UCU is now all too eager to isolate -- as we embrace scholars from many countries regardless of divergent views on their governments' policies. Therefore, if the British UCU is intent on pursuing its deeply misguided policy, then it should add Columbia to its boycott list, for we do not intend to draw distinctions between our mission and that of the universities you are seeking to punish. Boycott us, then, for we gladly stand together with our many colleagues in British, American and Israeli universities against such intellectually shoddy and politically biased attempts to hijack the central mission of higher education.

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EAAZI Guest Submission: A Poem

The ney is a 4000 year old Middle Eastern musical instrument; the oldest extant.

With apologies to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem, Kubla Khan:

Palestine

In Palestine did perfidious Zion
Descry two tribes of Abraham
Where Aleph the scarlet letter ran
Through convolutions unwitnessed by man
Down to a sunless land
So, thrice thousand miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were encircled around
And there were gravestones filed in sinuous rills
Where once blossomed children in the country
Of olive trees ancient as the hills
Now enfolding dark leafless tracery

But oh! that deep chasm filled with cant
Down the barren hill with nary a flower
A savage place! as hatred was flaunted
As e'er thing under the sun was haunted
By demon helicopter which o'er field did hover!
And from this chasm, with endless murder seething
As if this torn earth were bleeding
A bomb fell amongst picnickers to burst
From whom it came are thrice accursed
Bullets fly from the encircling jail
A boy and his father torn apart by merciless hail
And 'mid these sacred fields of forever
Flung up once again the bloody river
Five times five thousand miles meandered the clan
Then reached purgatory measured by Man
Dead floating souls in caverns endless
Overwhelm'd by hordes of infinite fiendishness
And from afar Abraham's people heard
God's message: Phoenix bird

The search for the eternal treasure
Stuck athwart a schoolgirl's grave
And sighs of mingled pleasure
Emerged from sacred Bethlehem's nave
It was a miracle that from the furnace's fire
Could emerge such voices of freedom's desire!

Young woman with a Ney
A vision without flaw
'Twas a Palestinian fey
And on her fairie instrument she played
Singing of peace long delayed
Could I wish within me

With such magic she
To such heights delivered me

That with magic and song
I would deliver up the throng
To sunny throne! From caves of fire!
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
Those burning eyes, her waving hair!
Close your eyes to the dead
For on the elixir of God had he fed
And drunk the promise of Paradise.

Naseer Ahmad 2008
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Thursday, July 24, 2008

Participating in an Obsolete Discourse

Fundamental Misconceptions About Israel, Iran
Comments by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)  
 
Friday, July 19 Trita Parsi and Roi Ben-Yehuda co-authored an article entitled Essential things Israelis and Iranians should know about each other that appeared in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz (הארץ). The article represented a sophisticated attempt to create a somewhat circumscribed space within Neocon-Zionist-dominated American discourse to discuss Iranian-Israeli and Iranian-American issues rationally.
 
Not only does the article's content feel somewhat quaint and antiquated because Americans have begun to discuss much more openly the pernicious effects of the Israel Lobby on American politics and foreign policy, but its reflexive genuflection to demonstrably false Zionist beliefs provides good evidence of the problems arising both
 
  • from discussing Israel and Zionism without a good understanding of Eastern European Jewish studies and also
  • from collaboration with an Israeli American fairly thoroughly indoctrinated in Zionist-American-Jewish mythology.
Here is an annotated version of the article. A blue sidebar adjoins the original text.
 
By Trita Parsi and Roi Ben-Yehuda
 
The looming Iran-Israel confrontation has a seemingly deterministic quality to it. Listening to the politicians, one gets a sense that powers beyond our control are pulling us toward a 21st-century disaster. Yet a great deal of the force propelling us into confrontation is fueled by ignorance and dehumanization. Israel is demonized as "Little Satan," while Iranians are portrayed as irrational Muslim extremists.

Indeed, mutual ignorance of our respective societies plays into the hands of the hard-line leaders who are calling for blood and destruction. They manipulate and distort; above all, they do everything to prevent us from recognizing that the enemy has a face.
 
"Hard-line leaders" can get away with distorting the issues because far too few members of the public have a sufficiently thorough understanding of the Eastern and Central European social political cultures from which the State of Israel descends.
 
Not that either of us is naive enough to believe that mere knowledge of one another will offer a miraculous solution. We do believe, however, that mutual understanding will go a long way toward allowing us to feel empathy and compassion for each other, and to sound off at those calling for bloodshed and war.

Here are some essential things Iranians and Israelis should know about each other:

1. Israel is a vibrant yet incomplete democracy

On his visit to the United States last fall, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad famously stated that there are no homosexuals in Iran. Well, in Israel there are plenty of homosexuals, and they are the only ones in the Middle East who have an annual gay pride parade in their capital city.

The authors' point is unclear.
 
Sexual identities represent social constructs. Western "gay-ness" does not really exist in Middle Eastern cultures except within Israel, which is really a transplanted mixed Central and Eastern European Jewish society.

As a fundamentally alien entity in the ME, the Zionist state hosts sexual identities that were already well-developed among German Jews and Eastern European ethnic Ashkenazim by the early 20th century.
 
Both groups have been active proselytizers for regendering Western society according to Yiddish models for at least the last 90 years.

As Columbia Professor Joseph Massad points out in Desiring Arabs, non-Westernized (and many Westernized) Arabs that engage in homoeroticism have no interest in the Yiddish regenderization program and generally reject Western homosexual identity, which Massad calls the Gay International.


Democracy in Israel means that every citizen and group (Jewish or otherwise) has the right to express him/herself and assemble in public. Also, that every citizen is equal under the law has voting rights, religious freedom, access to education, health care, opportunity.
 
To believe that non-Jewish citizens are equal in an officially Jewish state is logically equivalent to believing that non-white citizens would be equal in an officially white state.
 
The State of Israel is an Eastern European ethnic fundamentalist völkisch racist formal democracy that has aspects of ethnocracy but is really dominated by a political military economic oligarchy. Such state organizations are common in modern Eastern European history and only denial or lack of familiarity with modern Eastern European political structures can explain the mischaracterization of the Israeli state.  All sorts of official and unofficial bias are built into the Zionist system. David Kretzmer goes through the legal discrimination in detail in The Legal Status of the Arabs in Israel.
 
Undoubtedly, Israel's democracy is still a work in progress. The fusion of religion and state has limited people's rights and freedoms (for example, Israelis of different faiths cannot legally marry one another in the country), and the de facto secondary status of Israeli Arabs is an affront to the country's democratic ideals.
 
Israel does not fuse religion and state in a Jewish counterpart of Islamist ideas like al-Islam din wa-dawla.
 
Zionist ideology slices and dices Jewish religion in order to support an ethnic fundamentalist political program in exactly the same way other similar Eastern European political movements like Greater Serbianism have used Christian religion.
 
While the second class status of Israeli Arabs (a Zionist ideological term) may be an affront to American democratic ideals, limiting the political voice of Israeli Palestinians (the term preferred by most Israeli citizens descended from the native Palestinian population) is a fundamental principal of Zionist ideology.
 
Fortunately, many people in Israel are assiduously working to change the system from within.
 
Not only is it hard to find Israeli Jews willing even to discuss Zionist völkisch racism honestly, but Israeli Jews have no real ability to reform the Israeli state because Zionist politics from the earliest days of the Zionist settlement until today have been completely dominated and controlled by the transnational hyperwealthy Jewish political economic oligarchic elite that has funded the Zionist movement and the Zionist settlement from the beginning
 
2. Iran is a vibrant quasi-democracy

It is far from a full democracy, but neither is it a complete dictatorship. Its severe limitations notwithstanding, Iran has a lively civil society and possesses most of the building blocks for a successful democracy down the road. Iranians' struggle for democracy dates back to the 1906 Constitutional Revolution. Since then, Iranians have learned two important lessons.

First, war and democratization don't mix. As tensions between Iran and the outside world increase, the first to pay are Iran's pro-democracy and human rights activists. For Iran to move toward a democratic system, it needs peace and tranquility; bombs and surgical strikes will achieve the opposite.

Second, when you carry out a revolution, you know against whom you are revolting, but not necessarily for whom you are waging the revolution. Iranians have little appetite for another revolution. As unpopular as their current government is, they prefer gradual and manageable change.

3. Streets are named for poets

Just like Iran, Israel puts great value on the written word. In Israel, streets are named for poets - writers who have revived a people and its ancient language.
 
The official Israeli national poet Chaim Nachman Bialik wrote in 1934 in The Present Hour:
 
"I too, like Hitler, believe in the power of the blood idea."
 
Figure 1 Rehov Bialik (Bialik Street) in Tel Aviv
 
The claims of national and linguistic revival are simply Zionist propaganda.
 
The Truth about National Revival
 
Tel Aviv University Professor Shlomo Sand has correctly pointed out that Judaism spread out from Palestine [and Mesopotamia], but the ancient inhabitants of Palestine never emigrated from their homeland. Modern ethnic Ashkenazim and German Jews have no ancestral connection to Palestine.
 
During the 19th century ethnic Ashkenazim began to develop political consciousness as a Yiddish ethnic group, which Zionist ideologists reinterpreted as a pan-Judaic ethnonational group in order to legitimize the theft of Palestine from the native population.
 
The Truth about Linguistic Revival
 
Modern Israeli Hebrew (MIH) is fundamentally relexified Yiddish. The vocabulary has some similarity to that of Arabic, but the grammar and the meanings of words have much more affinity to Yiddish, German and Slavic than to any Semitic language including Biblical or Mishnaic Hebrew. (See Les origines des juifs actuelsThe Origins of Modern Jewry and Two-tiered Relexification in Yiddish, Jews, Sorbs, Khazars, and the Kiev-Polessian Dialect, by Paul Wexler.)
 
Except for vocabulary Modern Israeli Hebrew has much more in common with Esperanto than with Rabbinic, Mishnaic or Biblical Hebrew.
 
It is the pen and imagination, more than the sword and muscle, that have been responsible for the creation of this nation.
 
The creation of the State of Israel was the result of the joint efforts of
 
in the context of a growing propensity on the part of  Eastern European ethnic Ashkenazim to use assassination, terrorism, mass murder, ethnic cleansing, and genocide to achieve political goals.
 
Israel's historical roots are traced in a book; its people are called the "People of the Book"; and its founding father, Theodor Herzl, a playwright, liked to write books. It is no surprise then that Israel leads the world in new book titles per capita per year.
 
The Bible develops the spiritual concept of Israel, but many scholars doubt the historicity of ancient Israel, which in any case has no connection with the modern völkisch nationalist concept of the Jewish people. The phrase "People of the Book" originates with Islam and served as the legal basis for tolerance of religious dissenters within Islamic society at a time when similar space for freedom of belief did not exist in the Christian world.
 
Central and Eastern European Jews developed a bookish orientation as a persistent side effect of the role that Jewish trading networks played in the international economy from late antiquity and through the 1600s.

As in Iran, everyday conversations in Israel are as likely to be peppered with literary references as with practical concerns.

4. Iranians are lonely and distrustful

Much like Israelis, Iranians feel painfully isolated in the Middle East. They are surrounded by people with whom they share neither language nor religion. Iran is majority Persian and Shi'ite; its neighbors are majority Arab and Sunni.

Nor does Iran have many friends beyond the Middle East. If anything, the international community has never treated them fairly, Iranians believe. In the last century alo ne, Iranians have contended with colonization and decades of foreign intervention, not to mention an eight-year war against Saddam Hussein, in which the entire world sided with Iraq.

The United Nations didn't consider Saddam's invasion a threat to international peace and security; it took the Security Council more than two years to call for a withdrawal. Another five years passed before it addressed Saddam's use of chemical weapons. For the Iranians, the lesson was clear: When in danger, Iran can rely on neither the Geneva Conventions nor the UN Charter for protection. Just like Israel, Iran has concluded that it can rely only on itself.

The above comment ignores a major difference between the Zionist and the Iranian relationship with international law.
 
The Iranian government has suffered frequent disappointments when the international comm unity has refused to apply international law in conflicts that have involved Iran.  Despite such disappointments the Iranian government has persistently reached out to governments and peoples throughout the Arab world, Latin America, Eastern Europe, the successor states of the Soviet Union, Asia and even to the USA in an ongoing effort to improve Iran's international relations.
 
In contrast, the Israeli government wants to thwart the application of international legal principles to the conflict over Palestine so that Zionists would be able to deal with the native Palestinian population with violence, mass murder, expulsion or however Zionists see fit without any external interference. To achieve this goal American Israel advocacy groups have an ongoing project of poisoning all discourse of international law and human rights.

5. Zionism is not a dirty word

In a show of disrespect, many leaders in Iran refer to Israel as the "Zionist regime." While being called a "regime" may not be flattering, for most Israelis, Zionism is not a dirty word.

From within, Zionism is a national liberation movement, whose aim it is to create a safe haven for Jewish people, culture and national identity. Zionism is the Jewish people's answer to the centuries-old impulse to erase them from history. When Ahmadinejad and his ilk speak of Zionism's imminent doom, they are in fact strengthening the very movement they seek to eliminate.

Israelis joke that Israel is the only country in the world where the words "dirty Jew" mean a Jew who has not taken a shower. In a way, this joke encapsulates the essence of Zionism. Everything else is commentary.
 
The comment is an attempt to control the discussion of Zionism and the State of Israel by depicting normal political analysis as equivalent to traditional anti-Jewish slurs.
 
Normal Political Analysis
 
While most non-Jews and many Jews that study Zionism fairly quickly conclude that it represents an extremely repugnant form of racist politics, the expression "Zionist regime" is no more disrespectful than expressions like socialist regime, liberal regime, Labor regime, conservative regime, royalist regime or Tory regime.
 
Zionists object to such usage because it separates the politics from the government. There is a South African government today, and there was a South African government before the end of Apartheid, but the Apartheid regime has fallen. Because Zionism is an integralist ideology, Zionists are unwilling to tolerate any suggestion that the government of the State of Israel might one day have a non-Zionist orientation.
 
By claiming that critics of Zionists are flinging slurs, Zionists have been able to short-circuit any sort of rational comparative political analysis of Zionist beliefs and practices, and Zionists often manage to argue that Zionism is perfectly legitimate as a national liberation movement even though by almost identical logic German Nazis could have asserted the legitimacy of German Nazism as a national liberation movement.
 
Not only do Zionists in general reserve to themselves the right to make Hitler analogies while a significant fraction of them rail against Islamofascism and accuse Palestinians of pogrom politics, but the Zionist intellectual leadership has also worked hard to render any comment about the obvious similarities of Zionism and German Nazism as beyond the pale of acceptable political speech.

Zionists have also been running a long term social project to indoctrinate the American public with the idea that only anti-Semite would compare the Nakba (Holoexaleipsis) to the Holocaust
 
  • even though conditions in the Occupied Palestinian Territories are generally worse than the situation in German Nazi occupied Poland circa 1940 and
  • even though Eastern European ethnic Ashkenazim were up to their eyeballs in mass murder, ethnic cleansing and genocide long before Hitler invaded the Soviet Union and the WW2 mass murder of Jews began.
Anti-Jewish Slurs
 
The term dirty Jews may not in fact originate with anti-Jewish gentiles. In Yiddish shmutsike yidn (equivalent to German schmutzige Juden) constitute the lowest class of Jews after proste yidn. Yiddish also provides a euphemism for this class in  אורחי פּרחי (orkhe porkhe). If treated as loshn-koydesh, this phrase means fleeting travelers, itinerants or hoboes, but porkhe is probably the Polish word porch, which means a scabby, mangy, low-class, mean, stingy, nasty or vulgar person. Porch (adjective parszywy) overlaps in connotation to a large extent with shmutsik or schmutzig.
 
Not only can the traditional Yiddish class terminology still be heard in Israel albeit often in Modern Israeli Hebrew calques, but far too many Israeli and non-Israeli Jews have no reluctance whatsoever to slander Arabs as dirty, and the phrase arabushim melukhlakhim is on the lips of far too many Hebrew-speaking Jews.
 
Here is an example of Zionist Jewish defamation of Arabs from Theodor Herzl's book Alt-Neuland (Old New Land).
 
Kingscourt und Friedrich beeilten sich auch fortzukommen. Sie fuhren auf der schlechten Eisenbahn nach Jerusalem. Auch auf diesem Wege Bilder tiefster Verkommenheit. Das flache Land fast nur Sand und Sumpf. Die mageren Äcker wie verbrannt. Schwärzliche Dörfer von Arabern. Die Bewohner hatten ein räuberhaftes Aussehen. Die Kinder spielten nackt in Straßenstaube.
Kingscourt and Friedrich hurried to get away. They traveled on the miserable railroad to Jerusalem. Even on this route, scenes of the deepest depravity. Flat land almost only sand and swamp. The spare cultivated fields as if scorched. Colorless villages of Arabs. The inhabitants looked like robbers. The children played naked in the street dust.
 
 
 
6. Sympathy with Palestinians, but no desire for conflict with Israel

Ahmadinejad's venomous rhetoric notwithstanding, Iranians don't spend much time thinking about Israel. They are far more concerned about Iran's crippled economy and rampant corruption. While the sympathies of most Iranians fall squarely with the Palestinians, this is not an issue they feel their country must be a ctively involved in.
 
Likewise, few populations or governments that considered Apartheid South Africa or Nazi Germany repugnant were spoiling for a war with either of these two states.
 
Yet as Jabotinskian Zionist political power wanes in the USA and Zionist Jewish political economic oligarchs come under increasing scrutiny, now may not be the time to enter into polite discussion with American Zionists.
 
As more and more gentile and Jewish Americans become critical or even hostile to the State of Israel, proposing an American tilt from Israel to Iran makes a lot of sense.
 
Such a political shift is hardly unprecedented in American history. Under President Nixon, the United States recognized the PRC as the legal government of China despite more than two decades of alliance with the RoC.
 
Because of the damage that Jabotinksian Neocon Zionists have caused the USA, Americans might be willing to entertain an even more radical shift in foreign policy.
 
Neocons and Zionist Americans have no problem with regime change, invasion, and massive population dislocation in Arab and Muslim countries. Not only is turnabout is fair play, but the Zionist intelligentsia and its allies shamelessly argue for military intervention in the Sudan ethough there is a far better argument for regime change, invasion, and forced transfer of (Zionist interloper) population in the case of Israel than there ever was in the case of Iraq or is in the case of the Sudan.

As a side effect of declaring Israel a terrorist enemy state, the US government could force those responsible for wrecking the US economy to pony up the cash and assets to fix it. At the very least, if the USA treated Israel as an enemy state, Arabs and Muslims would no longer consider American leaders hypocritical in claiming to support democracy, human rights and anti-racism.
 
Iranians will fiercely defend their independence and territory, yet they have no desire for conflict with Israel. Iranians remember Alexander's sacking of Persia, the Arab conquest in the seventh century C.E., the Mongol invasion, and the 1953 CIA coup against Iran's democratically elected prime minister. But there is no recollection of any conflict with the Jewish people because there hasn't been one. Most Iranians would like to keep it that way.
 
Of course, Iranians have no historical memory of conflict with the Jewish people. The Jewish people is a modern construct less than 200 years old. Conversely modern German and E. European Yiddish Jews have no historical relationship with Persian-speakers even if some of the ancestral pre-Ashkenazi populations
 
  • that lived in the region of the Black sea and
  • that were probably incorporated into the Judaizing Khazar empire
may have had kinship connections to populations within neighboring Iranian political entities.
 
Yet Zionists do have scriptural sources like the Book of Esther that can be used to incite hostility against Iranians, and no Iranian political entity, whatever its ideological or religious orientation, is likely to accept permanently a status quo in which any Levantine entity has hegemony over a region that Iranian states have historically considered their natural geopolitical sphere of influence.

Roi Ben-Yehuda is an Israeli-American writer living in Spain. He is a regular contributer to Jewcy and France 24. His blog can be read at Roi's Word Weblog

Dr. Trita Parsi is the author of "Treacherous Alliance - The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the US" Yale University Press, 2007), a Silver Medal Recipient of the Council on Foreign Relations' Arthur Ross Book Award, the most significant award for a book on foreign affairs.
www.tritaparsi.com
 
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Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Economics of Intangibles, Zatzman, ul-Islam

Arabs, Jews, and Muslims in Economics
by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

Gary Zatzman and Rafiqul Islam recently published The Economics of Intangibles. In the preface they state:
Up to now economics as a branch of social science has been mainly concerned to map the commercial and financial relations of Humanity including a wide variety of institutions spawned to sustain livelihoods within these relations. Although these relations, qua relations, are by definition intangible, the forms by which these relations are expressed -- and in which they may even be quantified, are by definition intangible, the forms by which these relations are expressed -- and in which they may even be quantified, predicted, and managed -- are all tangible. Thus we have arrived at the tantalizing paradox, wherein for economists, tangibles seem to occupy the entire space of interest, even though that which has given rise to their very field in the first place are actually social relations that remain utterly intangible.

Always and everywhere the tangible is quantifiable. However, lifting this veil uncovers something very strange. To the extent that tangible economic activity takes quantifiable form, it is possible to generalise about the forms themselves and-or to verify them, without reference to any further information as to the intent, conscience, or consciousness of those who gave rise to these activities in the first place. This elimination of "subjective factors", such as intent, was long trumpeted as the economists' greatest success (as social "scientists") -- but is it?
As I have looked at the intersection of ethnicity and economics especially as it relates to Friedmanism, Zionism and Yiddish culture (and then instantiates itself in the thinking of important modern Zionist Jewish economists like Lawrence Summers, who recently began to wear his Jewishness or Yiddishkeyt on his sleeve), I have begun to ask the same question and probably should not have been surprised as I looked through the preview of the book that it contained an email exchange in which Wafaa' al-Natheema of the Institute of Near Eastern and African Studies, Naseem (Nissim) Rejwan of Hebrew University, Peter Sluglett of the University of Utah, Sheila Musaji of The American Muslim e-zine and I took part. The entire discussion of the Arabic identity of Iraqi Jews can be found by threading through the hyperlinks starting at Attacking Shohat: Falsifying Jewish History.

In another context Gary Zatzman has also peeled away the veil of false devotion to human rights by Natan Sharansky and Irwin Cotler in Ministering injustice, which can be found at Zatzman's web site Online Ticket to the Political Thicket.

In other words both "elimination of subjectivity" and also "appeals to conscience and higher ideals" like human rights (or stopping genocide in Darfur" often conceal conscious Zionist intent or Pavlovian Zionist conditioning in contemporary political or academic discourse.
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