Zionist Israel as Levittown Nation

Jews: For, Against Civil Rights

On April 13, Forward reporter Joanne Jacobson reviewed Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America’s Legendary Suburb by David Kushner in Jew vs. Jew in Levittown.

Two paragraphs in the article seem to have relevance to the Israel Palestine conflict.

William Levitt’s assertion of control over every aspect of the visual landscape — Levitt & Sons would, for example, arrange (and bill) for the trimming of any lawn whose care did not meet company standards — evidences how closely the hope and order fleshed out in Levittown were matched in Cold War America by fear and suspicion. But because Kushner does not make enough analytical sense of the stories that he intertwines, the legacy of the summer of racial tension in the Pennsylvania Levittown still feels incompletely written. Kushner cites Levitt’s assertion that “Negroes were trying to do in six years what the Jews had not been able to completely do in six thousand… if I sold to Negroes, ninety percent of the white people now buying homes would not buy.” And he emphasizes how Levitt insinuated that his critics were Communists and how Levitt even courted Joseph McCarthy’s legislative support for favorable mortgage financing by giving McCarthy a personal tour of the Long Island Levittown. Yet, Kushner does not sharply examine the linkages between McCarthy and Levitt or directly consider how the race war at the Pennsylvania Levittown reiterated the American unreadiness to live with difference that McCarthyism fed on. And Kushner’s description of the Levitts as “icons of optimism, titans on par with Walt Disney and Henry Ford,” stops curiously short of linking William Levitt to Disney’s anti-Communism and Ford’s racism.

In facing off the Jewish developer Levitt and the Jewish activists the Wechslers on fresh suburban ground, Kushner also leaves hanging another set of provocative issues. Was Levitt’s invocation of Jewish experience in defense of his whites-only policies simply a hypocritical cover for his own unrepentant racism, or a version of the self-erasure that had led him to bar Jews from Strathmore, his first pre-Levittown development on Long Island? And how many layers of resentment were packed into such epithets as “nigger-loving Jewish motherf——-s” that their Levittown neighbors spat into the Wechslers’ phone?

Jacobson should also have asked whether Levitt's policy of keeping Strathmore a white Christian community and making the Levittown developments whites-only represents the same racist Jewish thinking that is the basis of the Zionist goal of creating a Judenstaat, which means either a state where Jews are privileged or a state where only Jews can be citizens.

In my document Judonia Rising: The Israel Lobby and American Society, I address some other situations where Jewish involvement in the civil rights movement connects to Zionism.

Here are the excerpts.

The Basic [Israel Lobby] Projects

...

Manipulating African Americans — usually via civil rights organizing and creating Jewishly correct African American leaders like Gloria White-Hammond. (See African Americans, Jews, and Islamophobia.[76]) [Originally civil rights was a project of Jewish radicalism although Jabotinskians used support for civil rights as the means to district from their racism against Palestinians. (See Militant Zionism in American: The Rise and Impact of the Jabotinsky Movement in the United States, 1926-1948[77] by Rafael Medoff.) Terror in the Night: The Klan's Campaign Against the Jews,[78] by Jack Nelson suggests that the organized Jewish community opportunistically used Jewish radicals to create conditions to scare up money from wealthy Jews and to manipulate the US government and law enforcement to do its bidding and eventually possibly to commit extra-judicial murder in response to a 1966 synagogue bombing. The skill set that the organized Jewish community developed in such efforts later proved extremely helpful in shutting down Arab and Muslim charities and think tanks.]

Defending Judonia (the Zionist Virtual Colonial Motherland) Outside the Legal System

Because working strictly via the legal system is in general too limited for the needs of empire, Judonia also uses forms of grass roots mobilization and conspiratorial politics.
...

Jack Nelson proposes in Terror in the Night: The Klan's Campaign Against the Jews[283] that a conspiracy between the leaders of the Meridian Mississippi Jewish community and representatives of ADL to manipulate the FBI in committing extra-judicial murder. He writes on p. 264:

Maria Knowles, the secretary who typed up Scarbrough’s reports of meeting with the informants and worried that she had participated in a murder plot, lives in Meridian, where she serves as secretary of the Seventh-Day Adventist church and as a teachers’ assistant at the church’s school.

He adds on p. 265:

Jim Ingram retired from the FBI at age fifty in 1982 and succeeded Moore at the Deposit Guaranty National Bank. He lives in Jackson. In 1992 he was appointed Mississippi’s commissioner of public safety, the State’s top law enforcement post.

Ingram disagrees with his close friend Moore about what happened at Meridian. “It was an ambush, that’s what they meant to do,” Ingram told me. “No question about that. They meant to kill them out there that night.”

The techniques that the ADL learned in manipulating the US government into violating the law may have later proved useful in manipulating US government officials into facilitating conspiracy against the rights of Arab and Muslim Americans.

Agents of Judonia within the US government almost certainly have aided this ongoing project.

Jewish Philanthropic Politics in the USA

Philanthropic politics has also been successful for manipulating non-Jewish politicians and groups especially when it has been applied to non-Jewish groups like African Americans.

In this particular case, the interplay between Jewish radicalism, the organized Jewish community and extremist Jabotinskian politics on issues of civil rights for African Americans has been complex but has nevertheless prevented the development of significant pro-Palestinian activism within the American black community and has even provided a means to involve African American community leaders in ongoing effort of Jewish Neoconservative Jabotinskians to incinerate the Sudan in an act of anti-genocide philanthropy.

[See 5th Question: Darfur,[224] Israel-Incited "Genocide" in Darfur?,[225] Followup: Israel-Incited "Genocide" in Darfur?,[226] USHMM: National Thought Control,[227] Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Service -- Today,[228] Profiteering from humanitarianism,[229] and African Americans, Jews, and Islamophobia.[230]]

German American Jews

The second stratum of Jewish immigration to the USA consisted mostly of German Jews with smaller Austrian and Swiss Jewish components. Like Spanish Jews the members of the second Jewish immigrant cohort were generally affiliated with family and business networks. They often benefited from the existence of Jewish communal institutions founded by Spanish American Jews.

German Jews generally entered the USA with some capital, which looked huge in contrast to the resources that contemporary Irish immigrants brought along to the USA on fleeing the Potato Famines.

German Jewish immigrants often possessed expertise in peddling, commodity trading, wholesaling, retailing, and estate management. Such skills were directly applicable to the economy of the Old South, and several German American Jewish families used profits from trading in the southern USA to found important investment banks that continue to do business to this day.

Once they achieved riches and became “Our Crowd” – especially in New York idiomatic usage, wealthy German American Jews tended unlike moneyed Spanish American Jews to prefer to work behind the scenes and had a tendency to throw money at problems.

“Our Crowd” set up numerous Jewish communal organizations like B’nai B’rith, which is the world’s oldest continuously operated Jewish community service and welfare organization. While the founding of B’nai B’rith was an important example of German American (and Spanish American) Jewish altruism, the founders hoped that better social services for impoverished Jews would make the Jewish poor less of a threat to the status of elite Jews.

At a later period “Our Crowd” founded the initially anti-Zionist American Jewish Committee to struggle to improved conditions for ethnic Ashkenazim in Eastern Europe partially out of fear that Eastern European Jewish immigrants to the USA might threaten the status of German American Jews. (Nowadays, both B’nai B’rith and the AJCommittee are very vocally Zionist. In 2002 B’nai B’rith worked with AIPAC to create the B’nai B’rith Youth Organization 4 Israel.)

In addition to organizations specifically for Jews, the dominant universalistic and humanitarian ethos of “Our Crowd” required the establishment of institutions to benefit the larger society. Brandeis Professor Jonathan Sarna[lii] writes on p. 308 of American Judaism: A History:[326]

Jewish patricians loomed large in the financial, legal, political, and administrative work of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban league.

Such charity is part of Judonian foreign aid, and just as the USA expects a return at least in the form of good will, Jewish donors to African American causes expect American Black leaders to forego criticism of Zionism and the State of Israel.

When the NAACP was first founded, wealthy American Jews might have hoped that mainstreaming African Americans could provide a sort of elevator effect to move the Jewish elite upward in American society as a whole.[liii]

Whether opportunistic or sincere, the universalistic humanitarian politics of “Our Crowd” played very well in the American press and especially in those papers owned or run by German American Jews, who immigrated to the USA with expertise in the heavily Jewish German publishing and newspaper industries.

As publishers of the New York Times, the German American Jewish Sulzberger family has tried to position the paper as the national journal of record while

• publicizing the good works of “Our Crowd”,
• covering up the ethnic Ashkenazi background of a disproportionate number Soviet leaders during the twenties and thirties and the role they may have played in the Holodomor,[327] and
• burying in the back pages any Holocaust news reports that made any mention of Jews as an ethnic group. (See Anti-War: 1960s versus 2000s.[328])

Nowadays, the Times has apparently given up any pretense to objective and honest reporting.

It puts MEMRI[329] propaganda on the front page. (See NY Times Panders Jewish Prejudice.[330])

[See also What Sanabel said.[331]]

Not only does the paper give an op-ed column to Thomas Friedman, who was a major player in the Neocon effort to manipulate the USA into attacking Iraq, but it has hired William Kristol as a columnist. (See Conservative William Kristol becomes NY Times columnist Politics Reuters.[332])

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 History Illuminates the Rage of Muslims[333]).

At this point, the NY Times plays a major propaganda role as Judonian journal of record.

Note

[liii] I have questions about the behavior of the NAACP during the early period of Jewish “guidance.” The recent release of Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas Blackmon opens up the question of the NAACP’s behavior during this time period. The effective reenslavement of African Americans after reconstruction was not really secret. There was even a popular saying to the effect that Lincoln freed the slaves and his son Robert Todd Lincoln as General Counsel and then as President of the Pullman Palace Car Company put them back in bondage. Many important Jewish philanthropists involved with fighting racism against Africans had interests in companies profiting from African American forced labor in the South.

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Ofra Haza: Jewish Arab Tragedy

While I have little sympathy for today's generation of non-Ashkenazi Israeli Jews and while I hardly consider the ruination of Jewish Arab culture in any way a crime comparable to the Zionist murder of Arab Palestine, the story of Ofra Haza is almost a metaphor for the damage that racist E. European Ashkenazim inflicted on Jewish Arabs. Read about her life and death in The double life of Ofra Haza. Sphere: Related Content

Syria Comment: Ali Khan “At the Hamam”

Ali Khan has provided an interesting cultural blog entry entitled At the Hamam for Syria comment.

You can find the missing picture of the Zahriyya Library in an article from the blog entitled Syria to the Bone.

Ali Khan mentions an Arabic counting song that was sung at a Passover ceremony in Damascus. He was probably referring to אחד מי יודע ('Who Knows One').

An Arabic version of this song can be found at Morocco, Meknes on a web page from the Jewish National and University Library -- National Sound Archives. Sphere: Related Content

Haq's Musings: China's Checkbook Diplomacy

In China's Checkbook Diplomacy, Riaz Haq discusses an important effect of Zionist manipulation, conspiracy and corruption on the American financial sector since the Zionist Virtual Colonial Motherland (Judonia) and the Israeli government began to put Jabotinskian principles of ethnonational financial warfare into effect since the 1980s. Sphere: Related Content

Appeals board won't reopen deportation case of alleged Nazi guard Demjanjuk - The Boston Globe

Because the Immigration Appeals board won't reopen deportation case of alleged Nazi guard Demjanjuk, John Demjanjuk's only recourse lies in the US Court of Appeals of the Sixth Circuit.

I have discussed similar cases previously in Zajanckauskas, Henss, Selective Prosecution and Equal Protection and pointed out

The Functions Manual: Criminal Division of the DOJ (http://www.usdoj.gov/jmd/mps/manual/crm.htm) says the following on the Office of Special Investigations.

Special investigations - since its creation in 1979, the Office of Special Investigations has been responsible for detecting, investigating, and taking legal action to denaturalize and/or deport persons who took part in Nazi-sponsored acts of persecution committed abroad during the period 1933-45 and, since December 2004, also for detecting, investigating, and taking legal action to denaturalize persons who participated abroad in acts of genocide or in acts of torture or extrajudicial killings committed under color of foreign law.

As far as I know the OSI has investigated neither for Jews involved in Soviet torture, extrajudicial killings, mass murder, ethnic cleansing, or genocide nor for Jews involved in revenge killings or torture after the defeat of Nazi Germany nor for Jews involved in pre-state Zionist or Israeli torture, mass murder, ethnic cleansing, genocide, or extrajudicial killings. Yet both Polish and also Lithuanian prosecutors have indicted or investigated Israeli Jews for such crimes. (See http://tinyurl.com/25zwfp for discussion of a Lithuanian case.)

The OSI has as of today yet to open up an investigation of Rahm Emanuel's father Benjamin, who currently has a medical practice on the north side of Chicago and who was according to the Daily News "once a member of the Irgun militia that fought for Israel's statehood."

When I lived in Chicago, I heard stories suggesting that Benjamin had taken part in terrorism and mass killing.

Demjanjuk was stripped of US citizenship because he was unable to clarify his activities during WW2. Yet OSI has never forced Russian Soviet or Israeli Jews with a high probability of involvment in genocide, torture, or extrajudicial killings to provide a full accounting of their pre-immigration activities.

The US Supreme Court is quite clear in the often cited case YICK WO v. HOPKINS, 118 U.S. 356 (1886).

In the present cases, we are not obliged to reason from the probable to the actual, and pass upon the validity of the ordinances complained of, as tried merely by the opportunities which their terms afford, of unequal and unjust discrimination in their administration; for the cases present the ordinances in actual operation, and the facts shown establish an administration directed so exclusively against a particular class of persons as to warrant and require the conclusion that, whatever may have been the intent of the ordinances as adopted, they are applied by the public authorities charged with their administration, and thus representing the state itself, with a mind so unequal and oppressive as to amount to a practical denial by the state of that equal protection of the laws which is secured to the petitioners, as to all other persons, by the broad and benign provisions of the fourteenth amendment to the constitution of the United States. Though the law itself be fair on its face, and impartial in appearance, yet, if it is applied and administered by public authority with an evil eye and an unequal [118 U.S. 356, 374] hand, so as practically to make unjust and illegal discriminations between persons in similar circumstances, material to their rights, the denial of equal justice is still within the prohibition of the constitution. This principle of interpretation has been sanctioned by this court in Henderson v. Mayor of New York, 92 U.S. 259 ; Chy Luny v. Freeman, 92 U.S. 275 ; Ex parte Virginia, 100 U.S. 339 ; Neal v. Delaware, 103 U.S. 370 ; and Soon Hing v. Crowley, 113 U.S. 703 ; S. C. 5 Sup. Ct. Rep. 730.

The present cases, as shown by the facts disclosed in the record, are within this class. It appears that both petitioners have complied with every requisite deemed by the law, or by the public officers charged with its administration, necessary for the protection of neighboring property from fire, or as a precaution against injury to the public health. No reason whatever, except the will of the supervisors, is assigned why they should not be permitted to carry on, in the accustomed manner, their harmless and useful occupation, on which they depend for a livelihood; and while this consent of the supervisors is withheld from them, and from 200 others who have also petitioned, all of whom happen to be Chinese subjects, 80 others, not Chinese subjects, are permitted to carry on the same business under similar conditions. The fact of this discrimination is admitted. No reason for it is shown, and the conclusion cannot be resisted that no reason for it exists except hostility to the race and nationality to which the petitioners belong, and which, in the eye of the law, is not justified. The discrimination is therefore illegal, and the public administration which enforces it is a denial of the equal protection of the laws, and a violation of the fourteenth amendment of the constitution. The imprisonment of the petitioners is therefore illegal, and they must be discharged. To this end the judgment of the supreme court of California in the Case of Yick Wo, and that of the circuit court of the United States for the district of California in the Case of Wo Lee, are severally reversed, and the cases remanded, each to the proper court, with directions to discharge the petitioners from custody and imprisonment.

Either the OSI has to start investigating probable Jewish genocidaires and mass murderers like Benjamin Emanuel, or Demjanjuk should be left in peace.

Otherwise the USA cannot be considered a Rechtstaat, which is a state ruled by law, but should instead be deemed a Judenstaat, where Jews are priviliged over non-Jews as is the case in the State of Israel.

I brought up the equal protection issue in a discussion on Jewcy.com: Pointing Fingers and Awarding Holocaust Heroics—What’s the Big Deal? My contribution starts with the seventh comment. The chauvinist Jewish response is quite enlightening.


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Dana Goldstein: Hebrew Schools and Israel

American Prospect author Dana Goldstein provides some criticism of Jewish day schools in Hebrew Schools and Israel, but the distortions of Jewish educational programs are far worse than she indicates because the Hebrew day school version of Jewish history is not merely exceptionalist but is also taught with complete decontextualization in order to make sure that Jewish children never learn about the legitimate grievances that non-Jews might have against Jews.

For example, in the USA it is hard to learn about the century of Eastern European Jewish sabotage, radical revolutionary violence, targeted assassinations, mass murder, ethnic cleansing, and genocide that preceded the Holocaust and that forms a continuum with Zionist extremism, racism, murderousness, and genocidalism to this day.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Yiddish authors Sholem Aleichem and I.J. Singer wrote about Jewish financial aggressiveness and fraud, but as far as I know, all economic texts -- generally written by Jews -- systematically underplay the role of Jewish networks of trust in creating the Long Depression, the Great Depression, the associated market crashes, and the preceding speculative bubbles.

Unfortunately even the more honest Yiddish novelists and short story writers show blindness, for they only mention the Jewish victims of Jewish financial shysters while the ruined non-Jews receive little if any attention.

This sort of Jewish obliviousness and economic violence forms a continuum with the corruption, conspiracy and manipulation that my wife Karin Friedemann describes in a recent Khaleej Times op-ed and that I discuss in my commentary on her article entitled Chop Shop Economics and Stealth Zionism.

Yet as charming as Goldstein's Hebrew day school reminiscences may be, I cannot overemphasize too strongly that the fault for modern Jewish and non-Jewish ignorance about the backstory of Zionist crimes and atrocities lies more with non-Jewish historians that systematically underemphasize the importance of Jewish history than it does with Hebrew day schools.
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Chop Shop Economics and Stealth Zionism

My wife Karin addresses the corrupt Jewish social networking that underlies the financial meltdown and that dominates Obama's economic team in Chop Shop Economics and Stealth Zionism.

Bob Rubin, Larry Summers, Timothy Geithner (apparently by marriage), Gary Gensler, Mary Shapiro, Peter Orszag, Ben Shalom Bernanke, Alan Greenspan, Bruce Wasserstein et al. belong to the Eastern European (or Eastern Europeanized) Jewish "New Crowd" or "Yids" that began to supplant the older German Jewish financial elite or "Our Crowd" during the Nixon administration. (Thanks to his stint at Wasserstein Perella, Rahm Emanuel was coopted into "New Crowd.")

Because the New Crowd has raised the level of Jewish financial agression several orders of magnitude beyond that which was described by Yiddish writers like Sholem Aleichem or I. J. Singer at the beginning of the twentieth century, it makes sense to use underwold analogies like a "chop shop," which strips stolen cars of valuable components for resale and then junks the rest, to explain the Summers-Geithner Plan.

When clever bankers created a mortgage-based derivative structure that made it possible for banks to carry mortgages on their books as non-mortgage assets, they broke the system of fractional reserve banking and in effect systematically stole money from the US government because the subterfuge made it practically impossible to determine whether a bank had reached its borrowing and loan-making limits.

According the Plan in its current form, the crooks get to purchase or repurchase the now toxic assets from the current owners, who could be the same as the buyers, by means of a small outlay of real cash and large non-recourse loans from the government.

Then the crooks identify real assets of value, effectively chop them out of the derivative frame, resell the valuable assets, and then default on derivative framework that surrounded those assets. Because the loans were non-recourse, the loan recipient merely transfers the once-again defaulted assets to the government in lieu of loan payment.

In effect the US government gets stuck with the derivative crud that encrusted those original assets that still have value as well as any defaulted properties that cannot be resold.

Note that the crooks, who are for the most part both the buyers and sellers, can easily profit hugely by misvaluating the toxic assets during the government-financed purchase even if the margin of the resale of a few purchased assets is not particularly large or even positive because the crooks as sellers received real cash from the non-recourse loans that the crooks as buyers received from the government.

Obviously, if the government is willing to print enough money, the government could cover the entire $64 trillion of vanished liquidity by means of this procedure while the crooks skimmed several trillion dollars more for themselves, but the dollar would lose so much value that most of the missing liquidity that vanished in the original financial meltdown would remain lost while the crooks would protect themselves from ensuing inflation by using the money injected into the financial system via loans to buy safer assets before the dollar value plumments.

In other words, the amount of money made available as non-recourse loans is irrelevant, for the Summers-Geithner Plan cannot possibly salvage the American or world financial system, which can only be revived by my 100 word strategy.

Even though Zionists have been seriously manipulating the US and world economies since the 1980s according to an ideology of ethnonational financial warfare developed by Jabotinsky and Achimeir in the 20s and 30s, the current disaster seems to be accidental.

Once the Friedmanite Neoliberal privatization-cum-looting of Eastern European and former Soviet assets was well under way, Jabotinskian Neocons and Friedmanite Neoliberals were already developing plans for the removal of Saddam Hussein with concomitant pseudo-democratization while Iraqi assets and revenue streams would be diverted to the USA before the American banking system became leveraged beyond recovery.

Because profits could be maximized if Iraqi privatization took place shortly after George W. Bush assumed office, there seems to have been a push for a confrontation with Iraq even before 9/11, which was a godsend to Jabotinskian Neoconservatives and Friedmanite Neoliberals.

Because the Iraqis proved stubborn, the "New Crowd" was prevented from looting Iraqi and instead cannibalized the US financial system to the point where Bernanke

• panicked,
• raised interest ratest with the result of pushing subprime mortgages into massive default, and
  
• thereby toppled the entire US and world financial systems.

The rest is history unfolding right before our eyes. Sphere: Related Content

Modern Identity Creates Ancient Origins

In Initial Comments: Saviors and Survivors I point out:

The politics of Darfur has another interesting Jewish aspect.

In his discussion of the history of Sudan, Professor Mamdani alludes to the underlying benefit of Arabization to the native Sudanese merchants of Funj but never seems to state it explicitly. As far as I can tell Arabization allowed the developing capitalist class to plug into Arab trade networks and apply the traditional Arabic-Islamic commercial code that made long distance trade possible. The Judaization of the Khazars probably took place for more or less the same reasons as I discuss in The Origins of Modern Jewry. In the cases of both Funj and also E. European ethnic Ashkenazim, migrant origins have been assumed or postulated for reasons that often relate to Zionist politics. In her most recent research Columbia Professor Nadia Abu el-Haj has addressed some of the genetic anthropological issues that appear in the comments section of the Origins article.

The process by which a mixed group of Turko-Slav, Slavo-Turkic, Armenoid, Balkan, Germanic, and Celtic populations of Eastern Europe and Southern Russia came to view themselves as originating in historic Palestine without a shred of evidence and with all available data indicating local autochthonous origins is not unique to ethnic Ashkenazim and is in fact one of the building blocks of the modern world.

Just as Sudanese history and politics is obscured by modern myths of Arab invasion, rejecting the facts of Yiddish origins makes it impossible to understand either the development of modern Jewry or the transition from the ancient to the Medieval Christian and Islamic worlds.

The effort of Jewish racists to enforce a false view of Jewish ancestry is also comparable to the German Nazi attempt to create a hegemonic discourse on German or Aryan origins. We can better understand the German Nazi mentality by studying the modern Jewish politics of Jewish origins.

The facts of the formation of Yiddish ethnicity are helpful in the struggle against the Israel Lobby because they facilitate the correct characterization of Zionist colonizers in Palestine as a despicable conglomeration of racist murderous genocidal invaders, interlopers, and thieves.

Yet it is even more important to acknowledge the impossibility of good and honest historiography without an accurate description of origins and myths of origins.
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Palestine Think Tank: Gilad Atzmon - Aaronovitch's Tantrum and the Demolition of Jewish Power

Gilad Atzmon participated in a wild discussion about anti-Semitism at Oxford Wednesday a week ago. He provides a report in Palestine Think Tank: Gilad Atzmon - Aaronovitch's Tantrum and the Demolition of Jewish Power

Dima Omar, So What Did We Learn About Anti-Semitism? covers the same discussion from the standpoint of an audience member. Sphere: Related Content

Why Arabs are Backing Sudan’s Bashir

Read my wife Karin's latest op-ed column at the Khaleej Times. This article can also be read Karin Friedeman's blog.
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Initial Comments: Saviors and Survivors

After reading the book entitled Saviors and Survivors, I have to hope that President Obama will appoint author Columbia Professor Mahmood Mamdani to serve on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) Council. Because it is still running the Darfur campaign, Mamdani's expertise would be more than relevant.

Not only would a council seat give him a good vantage point for some American sociological studies, but the same sorts of analysis that one might apply in Sudan should be applied to the American Jewish community especially when there is so much historical precedent for some of the Save Darfur pathologies, which reproduce a lot of the nonsense of Holocaust studies.

In Jewish studies obliviousness to the facts does not start with Holocaust historiography.

Below is a passage from a paper I am writing. Professor Stanislawski points out that today's discussion of Russian Jewry was distorted because of the biases of early historiographers. I would go further to argue that the chroniclers/reporters of the 1830s-1880s were already producing a very distorted view of contemporary events. (I have spent a good deal of time in comparing Russian, German, Yiddish and Hebrew accounts of the same events.)

Creating the Orthodoxies

Stanislawski discusses one of the basic constructed orthodoxies of Jewish studies in theory only tangentially related to Zionism but deeply connected to Judonia in Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews, The Transformation of Jewish Society in Russia, 1823-1855[296] on p. 3:

Before we can study the history of the Jews in the Russia of Nicholas I, we must examine the legacy of interpretation bequeathed to us by the classic historians of Russian Jewry. With the luxury of hindsight it is possible to discern that this scholarship reflected the social and political circumstances of its authors as much as history itself. This is, of course, true to some extent of all history writing, but Russian-Jewish historiography was particularly conditioned by contemporary reality: apolitical objectivity was neither its hallmark nor even its pretended goal. On the contrary, all the major historians of Russian Jewry consciously and candidly wrote history as a political and national statement, hoping to redress the tragedies by chronicling their horrors and thereby to influence in the most direct fashion the political fate of the Jews. Many of the resultant works were issued as party publications or parliamentary briefs. Most were published by openly ideological presses or periodicals. While the ideologies involved ranged across a reasonably broad spectrum of political opinion, they were all united against one common enemy, the tsarist regime and its obvious anti-Semitic bent as exemplified by the governments of Alexander III and Nicholas II.

This exogenous stimulus to scholarship quite naturally had considerable effect on the assumptions, as well as the conclusions, of the scholars. To a large extent, their research was aimed at tracing the origins and background of contemporary attitudes and actions of the Russian authorities in regard to the Jews. This led, perhaps inevitably, to what now appears as an overidentification of the past with the present, a projection backward of the context of the government’s relations with the Jews.

The analogy with contemporary Holocaust scholarship can hardly be avoided. (See Bringing Holocaust Religion to Arabs.[297])

The analogy with Save Darfur literature is also unavoidable.

Obviously, if one suspects that the later historiographers were ideological with regard to their past (and our more distant past), one has to wonder about the soundness of their discussion of their own time period. For example, we all read about the terrible 1881 pogroms in Czarist Russia, but they came in the aftermath of a targeted assassination of the Czar that was probably mostly led and planned by radical Russian ethnic Ashkenazim after considerable radical sabotage and violence on the part of a segment of the Russian ethnic Ashkenazi community.

Russia in the 19th century was no more black and white than Rwanda, Darfur, or Europe in the 1930s. (When the German Nazis were burning books, the Soviets leadership, which was disproportionately ethnic Ashkenazi, was having the authors shot by executioners, who were almost always ethnic Ashkenazim.)

History aside, there is also a very peculiarly modern Jewish aspect to the Save Darfur movement.

When I testified before the Massachusetts legislature (see 5th Question: Darfur), I spent some time in speaking with the a lot of the Jewish Day School Save Darfur activists and their minders. There was probably a desperate desire on the part of Jewish parents and grandparents to create a safe form of activism for Jewish high schoolers and college students lest they become involved in anti-Israel Divestment movements, which are themselves largely Jewish -- at least according to my experience at MIT and Harvard.

Such a safe haven was needed because a lot of older Jews will never admit it but are aware that the Palestinian question is far more black and white than the Holocaust ever was because -- to be frank -- a bunch of racists invaded from E. Europe and stole the country from the native population after planning the crime for approximately 66 years.

Just as Jewish group psychology behind Saved Darfur requires more exposure, Professor Mamdani needs to look more closely at the Jewish aspects of the development of the anti-war movement in the 1960s versus Save Darfur in the 2000s. There seems to have been a feeling in a large part of the organized Jewish community circa 1965 that resources were being squandered in Vietnam that Israel might need soon need. Just as the organized Jewish community put its considerable mobilization resources into the service of Save Darfur because it believed Save Darfur to be good for the Jews, it put its resources into the service of the anti-War movement in the 60s because it believed that resistance to the Vietnam War was good for the Jews. (LBJ complained about the behavior of the Jewish community in this regard.)

The politics of Darfur has another interesting Jewish aspect.

In his discussion of the history of Sudan, Professor Mamdani alludes to the underlying benefit of Arabization to the native Sudanese merchants of Funj but never seems to state it explicitly. As far as I can tell Arabization allowed the developing capitalist class to plug into Arab trade networks and apply the traditional Arabic-Islamic commercial code that made long distance trade possible. The Judaization of the Khazars probably took place for more or less the same reasons as I discuss in The Origins of Modern Jewry. In the cases of both Funj and also E. European ethnic Ashkenazim, migrant origins have been assumed or postulated for reasons that often relate to Zionist politics. In her most recent research Columbia Professor Nadia Abu el-Haj has addressed some of the genetic anthropological issues that appear in the comments section of the Origins article.

Even though Professor Mamdani mentions involvement of Hollywood personalities in Save Darfur activism, he fails to address Hollywood Jewish Zionist scripting of bloodthirsty Arabs in the Palestine-Israel context since the 1950s and how this sort of racist propaganda has been used by Save Darfur activists.

The 1959 movie Solomon and Sheba is an early example. Here is the description.

Solomon and Sheba (1959, MGM/UA) targets Ashkenazi Americans and superficial Zionistically-inclined biblical literalists.

Anachronism is pervasive in this film. The Star of David was completely unknown as an ancient "Israelite," Judean or even Jewish symbol until the last few hundred years. As a Jewish symbol, before Zionism the hexagram is associated mostly with Sabbatian and perhaps Frankist heresies. Yet, the troops of King David and King Solomon wear Stars of David on their uniforms, and it serves as a decoration throughout the film.

King Solomon, who is played by Yul Brynner, repeats all sorts of Zionist slogans throughout the movie, and the geopolitical situation described in the movie is obviously constructed to the reflect Zionist perception of the situation of the State of Israel in the 1950s.

It is intriguing that the man that conceptualized the story for the screen was King Vidor, who was one of the most talented of Hollywood directors. He finished the directing of The Wizard of Oz without credit

Vidor had strong connection to Premillennial Dispensationalist Christianity. He grew up in Vidor, Texas, which was founded by his father C. S. Vidor. This town is still noted for irredentist unreconstructed Confederate attitudes, apocalyptic evangelical fundamentalism, KKK connections and extreme racism. It is also very typical bedrock Texas community of the sort the supports George Bush.

Solomon and Sheba was not a blockbuster, but it did make money and was perhaps symptomatic of things yet to come.

Note that Shindler's List has a structure and scene breakdown that is very similar to The Wizard of Oz.

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Collection: Non-Ashkenazi Jews

Non-Ashkenazi Jewish themed blog entries:

• Some Things Never Change
• mariahussain: Hijab in America -- not exactly on topic but has a nice picture of a Jewish woman from Rabat
• Conundrum of Jewish Arab Identity
• Attacking Shohat: Falsifying Jewish History
• Economics of Intangibles, Zatzman, ul-Islam -- identity and economics
• Economics of Intangibles, Conspiracies, Corruption -- identity and economics
• The Changing Agenda of Israeli Sociology, Theory, Ideology and Identity by Uri Ram -- reviews some of the sociological literature
  

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Interview of Harun Yahya

Harun Yahya is the pen name of Adnan Oktar, who is one of today's most prominent and widely read Turkish intellectuals. Not only has he taken a strong stand against materialism and Darwinism, but he has also been subjected to false psychiatric imprisonment because of his forceful advocacy both for social reform recognizing Turkey's Islamic spiritual heritage and also for political reform rejecting any role for the sorts of conspiracy that has played far too much of a role in modern Turkish and late Ottoman governance.

In the Turkish context such conspiracies are often called Masonic whereas Eastern European and Russian historians in comparable political situations might refer to radical or revolutionary conspiracy. US political scientists and historians prefer not to discuss conspiracy in the context of American history and politics, but the Israel lobby as described in The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt is nothing but a vast political conspiracy of the sort often discussed in Eastern European historiography.

AN INTERVIEW WITH MR. ADNAN OKTAR BY AL JAZEERA TV (Istanbul - August 6, 2007)

On March 3, prominent Turkish neurosurgeon Oktar Babuna acting on behalf of Harun Yahya at the Pontifical Gregorian University International Conference on "Biological Evolution: Facts and Theories" was prevented from challenging the Vatican's 1996 acceptance of the Theory of Evolution.

Harun Yahya has kindly offered to be interviewed on this blog with regard to Darwinism and related issues. To the first approximation Harun Yahya's concerns are somewhat off-topic for this blog, but because Zionist ideology incorporates a lot of 19th century social Darwinist, biological determinist, and racist concepts, it is worthwhile to look critically at the ideas, which Harun Yahya confronts.

Here are my questions in red. Each question is preceded by context contained within square brackets.

[Context: Darwin's theory was a starting point for the modern scientific thinking about biological diversity. Darwin had no understanding of genetics and tended toward a Lamarckian view of inheritance. Evolutionary biology incorporates modern genetic theory. Evolutionary Psychology is an attempt to apply evolutionary ideas to social groups without the distortions and judgments of Social Darwinism.]

1. Is the criticism of Darwinism meant to refer specifically to:

• Darwin's theory as presented in The Origin of the Species,
• Social Darwinism, which is an inappropriate application of Darwin's ideas to social outcomes,
  
• the Theory of Modern Evolution or the field of Evolutionary Biology, which includes among other subjects microevolution and macroevolution,
  
• Evolutionary Psychology, which attempts to explain mental and psychological traits—such as memory, perception, or language—as adaptations, that is, as the functional products of natural selection or sexual selection, or
  
• any evolutionary ideas applied to humans and to human society?
  

[Context: E. O. Wilson argues Sociobiology that altruism can evolve biologically. It seems to place a limit on God's power to assert that God could not create a universe in which spirit or consciousness could evolve. Philip Roth wrote a short story entitled The Conversion of the Jews, which addresses a false theology that improperly places limits on God.]

2. Is God incapable of creating a world in which the Theory of Modern Evolution is a valid approximate description of the means by which biological diversity originates?

[Context: As I understand Modern Turkish history, in creating the modern Turkish Republic, Atatürk and his associates, did not intend to oppose Islam but were rather convinced that Ottomanism had produced a society

• that had failed in a Social Darwinian sense and
• that was burdened by an un-Islamic Byzantine heritage.

In their desperation to create a modern defensible state that could stand up to European aggression, the original Kemalists cut off modern Turkey both from both its Balkan European/Byzantine heritage and also from its Arabic religious heritage.

As a truly disinterested observer I have the impression

(a) that both the heirs of Kemalism and also today's opponents of Kemalism either no longer remember or understand the original conflict between Kemalism and Ottomanism and

(b) that this amnesia or incomprehension is beginning to cause serious damage to the Turkish political system.]

3. Is the Justice and Development Party (Turkish: Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi or AK Parti, or AKP) attempting

• to restore Ottomanism,
• to create a Salafist Islamic State from first principles,
• to build a modern Turkish state in which Islam plays a role comparable to that of Christianity in Europe and N. America or
• to establish some other sort of system?

[In their quest to improve Turkey's geopolitqical situation, secular/Kemalist Turkish parties of the right and left often sought alliance with the Israel Lobby, which can be viewed as a quasi-Masonic conspiracy although its origins lie in the collapse of Commonwealth Poland in the 17th century and not in Freemasonry. The quid pro quo included Turkish recognition of the State of Israel along with military alliance in exchange for political support on Greek- or Armenian-related issues. The deal has begun to fall apart

a) because a segment of the Israel Lobby has begun to use the Armenian issue as part of an effort to scare-monger a false Islamophobic consensus on the Question of Palestine,

b) because disastrous Bushite/Zionist foreign policy decisions have tremendously altered Turkey's geopolitical situation, and

c) because Prime Minister Erdoğan was unable to remain silent during the recent IDF rampage through Gaza.]

4. Does continued Turkish-Israel military alliance make any sense on any basis?

[Context: We do not have a sane discussion of genocide in the USA. Not only are ethnic Ashkenazi Americans, who try to act as the guardians of US genocide discourse in order to control it, at least as much genocide deniers as Turks, but a segment of the organized Jewish community is also trying to use the Armenian genocide and a very selective reading of Ottoman or Turkish history as part of a program to control genocide discourse and to incite Islamophobia.

Under Turkish Rule points to an example of this sort of biased and hate-filled writing from Andrew Bostom.

The Turks are justifiably sensitive to prejudice against Islam and the Ottoman Empire, whose intellectual and political achievements rendered the word Turkish synonymous with Muslim from the 15th until the beginning of the 20th century.

Throughout the 19th century demonization of Islam and the Ottomans justified mass murder and expulsion of Balkan Muslims while during the same time period similar outrages accompanied Russian expansion into Muslim areas of the Caucasus. The victims of Russian genocidalism generally sought and were granted refuge within the Ottoman Empire.

Tel Aviv Uiversity Professor Ehud Toledano remarks in Slavery and Abolition that scholars have generally used terms like forced migration to minimize the crimes of Czarist expansionism.]

5. Will Turks be able to engage in a rational discussion about genocide before Americans and other Westerners show even-handedness through some sort of acknowledgment of the genocide and ethnic cleansing

• of Balkan Muslim populations as the Ottoman Empire retreated and
• of Caucasian Muslims as the Russian Empire expanded?

(Note that Harvard has occasionally exhibited early 20th century Balkan anti-Muslim postcards celebrating the ethnic cleansing or genocide of local Muslims populations.)

[Context: Islamophobes have opened many fronts in their war against Muslims and Islam. One favorite attack focuses on Sura 4:34.

سُوۡرَةُ النِّسَاء

ٱلرِّجَالُ قَوَّٲمُونَ عَلَى ٱلنِّسَآءِ بِمَا فَضَّلَ ٱللَّهُ بَعۡضَهُمۡ عَلَىٰ بَعۡضٍ۬ وَبِمَآ أَنفَقُواْ مِنۡ أَمۡوَٲلِهِمۡ‌ۚ فَٱلصَّـٰلِحَـٰتُ قَـٰنِتَـٰتٌ حَـٰفِظَـٰتٌ۬ لِّلۡغَيۡبِ بِمَا حَفِظَ ٱللَّهُ‌ۚ وَٱلَّـٰتِى تَخَافُونَ نُشُوزَهُنَّ فَعِظُوهُنَّ وَٱهۡجُرُوهُنَّ فِى ٱلۡمَضَاجِعِ وَٱضۡرِبُوهُنَّ‌ۖ فَإِنۡ أَطَعۡنَڪُمۡ فَلَا تَبۡغُواْ عَلَيۡہِنَّ سَبِيلاً‌ۗ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ كَانَ عَلِيًّ۬ا ڪَبِيرً۬ا

[Men are in charge of women, because Allah hath made the one of them to excel the other, and because they spend of their property (for the support of women). So good women are the obedient, guarding in secret that which Allah hath guarded. As for those from whom ye fear rebellion, admonish them and banish them to beds apart, and scourge them. Then if they obey you, seek not a way against them. Lo! Allah is ever High, Exalted, Great.]

The corresponding verse in the Bible (Genesis 3:16) belongs to the narrative of Adam and Eve.

אֶֽל־הָאִשָּׁ֣ה אָמַ֗ר הַרְבָּ֤ה אַרְבֶּה֙ עִצְּבֹונֵ֣ךְ וְהֵֽרֹנֵ֔ךְ בְּעֶ֖צֶב תֵּֽלְדִ֣י בָנִ֑ים וְאֶל־אִישֵׁךְ֙ תְּשׁ֣וּקָתֵ֔ךְ וְה֖וּא יִמְשָׁל־בָּֽךְ׃ ס

[King James Bible: Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.]

The Quran limits male chastisement of a woman to a beating (and in one possible interpretation does not restrict female chastisement of men at all). In contrast the Hebrew phrase יִמְשָׁל־בָּֽךְ (he shall rule over thee [feminine]) gives a man essentially royal authority to torture, to kill and to do as he pleases with his wife. Thus, the Quran is more sophisticated, nuanced and sympathetic to women than the Hebrew and Christian Bibles.

Likewise the entire Quranic approach to creation is far more subtle than the Biblical Adam-and-Eve narrative, which is so myth-encrusted or superficially allegorical that the preeminent Jewish Biblical commentator RASHI explicitly rejects any literal interpretation of this portion of the Biblical text in his famous commentary.

While the Bible obscures the important issue with blame-shifting on the part of the Biblical Adam, the Quran focuses on free-will (Sura 7: 19-25) in an unadorned description of the first choice that transformed man from an instinctual being into one that could choose between good and evil.

سُوۡرَةُ الاٴعرَاف

وَيَـٰٓـَٔادَمُ ٱسۡكُنۡ أَنتَ وَزَوۡجُكَ ٱلۡجَنَّةَ فَكُلَا مِنۡ حَيۡثُ شِئۡتُمَا وَلَا تَقۡرَبَا هَـٰذِهِ ٱلشَّجَرَةَ فَتَكُونَا مِنَ ٱلظَّـٰلِمِينَ (١٩) فَوَسۡوَسَ لَهُمَا ٱلشَّيۡطَـٰنُ لِيُبۡدِىَ لَهُمَا مَا وُ ۥرِىَ عَنۡہُمَا مِن سَوۡءَٲتِهِمَا وَقَالَ مَا نَہَٮٰكُمَا رَبُّكُمَا عَنۡ هَـٰذِهِ ٱلشَّجَرَةِ إِلَّآ أَن تَكُونَا مَلَكَيۡنِ أَوۡ تَكُونَا مِنَ ٱلۡخَـٰلِدِينَ (٢٠) وَقَاسَمَهُمَآ إِنِّى لَكُمَا لَمِنَ ٱلنَّـٰصِحِينَ (٢١) فَدَلَّٮٰهُمَا بِغُرُورٍ۬‌ۚ فَلَمَّا ذَاقَا ٱلشَّجَرَةَ بَدَتۡ لَهُمَا سَوۡءَٲتُہُمَا وَطَفِقَا يَخۡصِفَانِ عَلَيۡہِمَا مِن وَرَقِ ٱلۡجَنَّةِ‌ۖ وَنَادَٮٰهُمَا رَبُّہُمَآ أَلَمۡ أَنۡہَكُمَا عَن تِلۡكُمَا ٱلشَّجَرَةِ وَأَقُل لَّكُمَآ إِنَّ ٱلشَّيۡطَـٰنَ لَكُمَا عَدُوٌّ۬ مُّبِينٌ۬ (٢٢) قَالَا رَبَّنَا ظَلَمۡنَآ أَنفُسَنَا وَإِن لَّمۡ تَغۡفِرۡ لَنَا وَتَرۡحَمۡنَا لَنَكُونَنَّ مِنَ ٱلۡخَـٰسِرِينَ (٢٣) قَالَ ٱهۡبِطُواْ بَعۡضُكُمۡ لِبَعۡضٍ عَدُوٌّ۬‌ۖ وَلَكُمۡ فِى ٱلۡأَرۡضِ مُسۡتَقَرٌّ۬ وَمَتَـٰعٌ إِلَىٰ حِينٍ۬ (٢٤) قَالَ فِيہَا تَحۡيَوۡنَ وَفِيهَا تَمُوتُونَ وَمِنۡہَا تُخۡرَجُونَ (٢٥)

[And (unto man): O Adam! Dwell thou and thy wife in the Garden and eat from whence ye will, but come not nigh this tree lest ye become wrong-doers. (19) Then Satan whispered to them that he might manifest unto them that which was hidden from them of their shame, and he said: Your Lord forbade you from this tree only lest ye should become angels or become of the immortals. (20) And he swore unto them (saying): Lo! I am a sincere adviser unto you. (21) Thus did he lead them on with guile. And when they tasted of the tree their shame was manifest to them and they began to hide (by heaping) on themselves some of the leaves of the Garden. And their Lord called them, (saying): Did I not forbid you from that tree and tell you: Lo! Satan is an open enemy to you? (22) They said: Our Lord! We have wronged ourselves. If thou forgive us not and have not mercy on us, surely we are of the lost! (23) He said: Go down (from hence), one of you a foe unto the other. There will be for you on earth a habitation and provision for a while. (24) He said: There shall ye live, and there shall ye die, and thence shall ye be brought forth. (25) ]

From the time that Werner Heisenberg, along with Max Born and Pascual Jordan, set forth the matrix formulation of quantum mechanics in 1925 and ever since Erwin Schrödinger's January 1926 publication in the Annalen der Physik of the paper "Quantisierung als Eigenwertproblem" [tr. Quantization as an Eigenvalue Problem] on wave mechanics, physicists and philosophers have speculated on the connection between classically perceived reality and the underlying quantum mathematics, which inherently involves indeterminacy. Several (e.g., Roger Penrose in The Emperor's New Mind) have speculated that quantum indeterminacy expresses itself in humans as the ability to choose or as free will, which is the foundation of the mind or consciousness, to wit, the soul.

Yet because there seems to be no way to incorporate mind into quantum theory, which intrinsically depends on the existence of a classical observer/consciousness, the plain meaning of the Quranic text itself seems quite compatible with modern quantum theory, which itself may imply external creation of the human consciousness or soul.]

6. Is the papal position that accepts modern biological evolution and reserves divine creation to the soul really inherently at odds with Quranic revelation?

[Context: Anti-Darwinists often focus on issues of lack of transitional species or the difficulty of evolving complex organs in challenging generic Darwinism, but evolutionary biologists already claim

• to have found evidence of transitional species and
• to have identified mechanisms of complex organ evolution.

Yet the studies of language within the field of evolutionary psychology have identified an issue that is genuinely intractable for modern evolutionary theory. After 16 years of age, humans are unable to fully acquire language. Without immersion in an environment of language, children do not acquire language. There are no examples of incomplete languages (except for certain genetic anomalies that prevent full acquisition of language during childhood).]

7. Whence comes language? Is it the result of external (i.e., divine) intervention? Does opposition to generic Darwinism require rejection of evolution in all situations? Does the existence of human language support the papal position on evolution?

[Context: Fully-formed languages change (evolve), spread, subdivide, combine, or die out. While the original theory of Darwin fails to describe the biological world, not only do Darwin's concepts apply quite well to fully-formed languages, but linguistic evolution may present a greater problem for Islamic theology than biological evolution because Muslims assume that the Quran is uncreated.]

8. Is the Arabic of the Quran uncreated? If the Quran being uncreated lies outside of this space-time, which is created, when it refers to events in the Arabic of this space-time, must such events have taken place in this space-time?

[Context: In a lecture at the Harvard Divinity School two decades ago, Catholic theologian Hans Küng pointed out that Islam provides a true witness to the life of Jesus — not the edited gentile Hellenistic version, but a genuine Semitic tradition that probably preserves the Jamesian perspective that was naturally closest to the reality of Jesus. (James was the brother of Jesus according to some Christian traditions.)

By the 3rd century CE a large part of the peasantry of Palestine were followers of Jesus and practiced a form of Christian Judaism in which Jesus was Messiah but neither God nor son of God. For this reason the Talmud is consistently contemptuous of the humble people, who comprised the am-haaretz, and am-haaretz is a derogatory epithet in Talmudic, Yiddish and Modern Israeli Hebrew idiom.

Nevertheless, we have reason to believe (including one origin story of the Ge'ez or classical Ethiopic translation of the Bible) that the beliefs of Palestinian Christian Judaism spread to Hijaz where they prepared the people for Muhammad's apostleship. When Umar al-Faruq opened Palestine to Islam, the humble people of the land (am haaretz) saw the fulfillment of the promise of Jesus in the religion of Islam, which means humility or meekness and which was a minor variant of the religion that they already practiced. As the Jewish Aramaic prayer says, yekum purqan min shemayya. Salvation shall come from the heavens. Hence the Quran which was brought down from heaven by Jibril/Gabriel is called al-furqan. (Note that Hebrew/Aramaic p becomes f in Arabic.)]

9. Is it legitimate from an Islamic standpoint to view Islam as the culmination of the evolution of Jesus' message of piety toward God and righteousness toward one's fellow man through an intermediate stage of Jamesian Christian Judaism?

[Context: The names of Muhammad (the favored one), Abdallah his father (the servant of God -- a title of James the Just, brother of Jesus), and Abd-ul-Mutallab his grandfather (servant of the chamber or book ) look very much like titles that signified a transfer or blending of authority from immigrant Judeans to Hijazi Arabs.

Umm abiha (mother of her father), which is an occasionally occurring Shiite title for Fatima, also looks like nomenclature preserved from some form of Christian Judaism if the members the Jamesian community used "father" as the title of the community's spiritual leader as Roman Catholics as well as Orthodox and Arab Christians do for their priests to this day.

When I look at the early history of the Sunni Caliphate based on presumptive pious leadership or the similar history of various Shiite Imamates based on a sacred lineage, they look comparable to the chronicles of the kings and the prophets in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles. The Biblical history serves as a warning against depending on a temporal-political leader instead of maintaining one's own spiritual rectitude vis-à-vis God.]

10. Is it legitimate to read the early Sunni and Shiite Islamic history as a parable teaching the Muslim community that it must evolve beyond dependence of charismatic political and hereditary leaders into a pious nation, whose members can independently keep their own relationship to God in proper spiritual order?


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Focus on Robert Kagan

Case Study: Neocon Mendacity, Misdirection

According to A correction and a query, Neocon historian and Bill-Kristol-collaborator Robert Kagan criticized one of Harvard Professor Stephen Walt's blog entries for making a false accusation:

The claim that I worked against a two-state solution in the Middle East is a complete fabrication. I have literally never written or spoken on the subject.

Robert Kagan is more or less yanking Professor Walt's chain.

Kagan seems to take the Oslo Process seriously, but only if the US supports Israel in everything it wants [1], and in reality neither Arafat [2] nor Abbas/Fatah[3] nor Hamas[4] is an acceptable negotiating partner.

In the Israeli political spectrum, I would put Kagan with Netanyahu -- fake negotiations and effective permanent Apartheid with periodic slaughter of Palestinians.

Here are the articles and interview on which I base my conclusion.

1. Green Light for Israel -- Sep 3, 2001, Even pro-US Arabs are bad, and only when Palestinians completely submit to the USA and Israel will negotiations be possible.

2. A Realigning Election -- Feb 14, 2005, Arafat had to die for the Oslo negotiation to go forward to a two state solution.

3. Democracy and the Middle East -- Jan 27, 2006, Hamas is good because Fatah is corrupt.

4. Surrender as 'Realism' -- Dec. 4, 2006, Hamas is bad because it won't concede as much as Arafat.

Robert Kagan has demonstrated yet another of the innumberable ways in which Neocon Zionists lie to Americans.

Thanks to Russian Jewish immigration of the early 1990s, Zionist Neocons simply have felt no pressure for a two-state solution even if they have occasionally faked commitment to the Oslo process. Kagan seems to plug right into this mentality. See Stephen Walt: Talking to Hamas?

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Harvard Book Store: Mamdani, Darfur

April 2, 2009, Cambridge, MA -- Columbia Professor Mahmood Mamdani, whose new book Saviors and Survivors has been just released, discussed his understanding of Darfur's local, national Sudanese, American, and international politics.

Mamdani began to look at the issue of Darfur in 2003 and was struck by the rapid globalization and the fact-indifference of the SaveDarfur movement, which consistently misrepresented the facts in a media blitz. For example, according to WHO the death toll was 50-70,000 while SaveDarfur claimed 400,000. SaveDarfur ignored drought and desertification, which were probably responsible for 70% of the mortality. A legitimate debate would ask how many could have been saved by timely assistance to the Darfuri population.

The British colonial land registration which gave some Darfuri groups homelands and others nothing created an inevitable background of conflict. The British favored settled populations over nomads.

Three somewhat overlapping periods characterize the Darfur civil wars.

Between 1987-1989 the scale of the violence went up tremendously because with drought and desertification life itself seemed to be at stake as Darfuri anthropologist Sharif Harir pointed out.

The 40 year Chad Civil war was subsumed into the Cold War during the 1980s. Libya and the Soviet backed one side while France, the USA, and Israel supported the other. Whenever one side had advantage, the other regrouped in Darfur, which by the late 1980s was awash with weapons.

An 18 month period of unprecedented brutality and mass killings began in 2003 and ended in September 2004 when tensions in the national government spilled over into Darfur as the reconciliation mechanisms put in place after 1989 broke down.

Yousif Takana analyzed the complexities of the conflict in "Darfur Conflict Mapping analysis" found in Darfur -- Daruf Dialogue and Consultation. He found a North South conflict between peasants and nomads. In the South, there was an East West conflict with Arab tribes on both sides. In other words, the real fault line lay between tribes with homelands and those without.

The major ramp up Darfur activism took place after the violence subsided. In 2008 1500 civilians were killed 600 from Arab tribal violence and 900 from the struggle between insurgents and counter-insurgents.

The African Union (AU) has been trying to end the conflict under a model based on the end of Apartheid:

• absence of victory,
• political reform,
• impunity or amnesty for the past.

The system has worked in Mozambique. Why should it not apply in Darfur?

US Darfur advocates demand accountability and enforcement of justice

• even though clear-cut perpetrators and victims do not exist and
• even though there are no safeguards to prevent the ICC prosecutor, who is only accountable to the UN Security Council, from going rogue in response to great power politics.

The SaveDarfur message, which has played a role in prosecutor Ocampo's choices, is simply incorrect and has no connection with the facts on the ground.

Jewish groups seized on the Arab/Arabized-identity of some of the indigenous African populations to demonize alleged Arab politics of genocide.

In his book on pp. 57-59, Professor Mamdani writes:

The central thrust of the Save Darfur campaign is that Darfur is a moral and not a political issue. To drive a wedge between morality and politics, Save Darfur worked through religious bodies and presented itself primarily as an interreligious coalition. It offered Americans the possibility of uniting around a moral cause --Darfur--regardless of political allegiance or ideological inclination. Where else could political figures as divided as Al Sharpton and Elie Wiesel speak from the same platform but one dedicated to saving Darfur -- as on April 30, 2006, at Washington's National Mall? Both spoke as Americans -- saviors without having to cite any other tradition in common. The Reverend Al Sharpton evoked the civil rights struggle: "This has been a long struggle, but now, when we see you here today, on the same ground that Martin Luther King came, on the same grounds that civil rights and civil liberties came, we know when America comes together, we can stop anything in the world. History will write that we came together in the first decade of the twenty-first century and stopped genocide in Sudan." For his part, Elie Wiesel evoked humanity: "We are here today because if we do nothing, Al Qaeda and the world's number one holocaust denier, the infamous ruler of Iran, Ahmadinejad, will send terrorists there .... Darfur today is the world's capital of human suffering. Not to offer our help, not to urge our government to intervene in every manner possible is to condemn us on grounds of inhumanity. Darfur deserves to live. We are the only hope."

A form of religious stereotyping emerged in 2006, when the SDC began to organize a series of public rallies, the first in April and the second in September, to mobilize mass support behind an interreligious call for military intervention in Sudan. The SDC prepared several sets of "action packets" for the April 2006 rally. The packets were identified according to religious affiliation: initially as Christian Faith, Jewish, Interfaith, and General Faith. After the April 2006 rally, with some noticeable unease, Muslims were added to a "civilized" campaign: a "Muslim Faith Action Packet" was added. The faith packets conveyed a clear division of responsibility among faiths. The Christian faith packets were the most explicit: They spoke of "divine empowerment" and "the burden to save." The "Christian Sample Prayer" asked God to forgive their failure to believe that "you have empowered us to protect our brothers and sisters." The Jewish faith packets emphasized "the special moral responsibility of Jews as 'quintessential victims' to identify genocide whenever it occurs." The "Jewish" million postcards material read: "Instead of mourning a genocide, what if we could STOP one? As Jews, we have a particular moral responsibility to speak out and take action against genocide." If Christians were meant to lead and Jews to bear witness, Muslims were asked to fight oppressors in their midst. The text in the Muslim faith packet focused "greatly on training Muslims in how to aid others, deal with conflict, avoid being oppressive, and intervene when other Muslims oppress." Clearly, the executive committee of Save Darfur thought of its constituency in terms of a religious hierarchy: If Christians were empowered to save and Jews sensitized to empathize, good Muslims had the potential to check bad Muslims by fighting oppressive tendencies within their own communities.

These "faith packets" have been revised many times over. The main effect has been "to nuance claims about ethnicity" But traces remain, perhaps as testimony to an original sin. Take these examples from material accessed at the Save Darfur site on January 29, 2008. The "Discussion Guide for Christian Congregations" asks: "How will we as a congregation be the keeper of our brothers and sisters in Darfur?" And the "Discussion Guide for Jewish Congregations" asks: "Is it possible to both bear witness to the Holocaust and other events in Jewish history while acting on Darfur? Does one detract from the other?" And then: "Do Jews carry a special responsibility to victims of genocide?" But this is how the "Discussion Guide for Muslim Communities" begins: "The violence in Darfur is inflicted by Muslims on Muslims. Does that change the obligation of Muslim people around the world to intervene?" Clearly, Darfur is a Muslim atrocity to which good Muslims must bear witness.

That Muslims have a special responsibility to fight oppression in their midst is a message often conveyed by New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof. Kristof chides Muslim and Arab peoples, and the Arab press in particular, for lacking the moral fiber to respond to this Muslim-on-Muslim violence, presumably because the violence is inflicted by Arab Muslims on African Muslims. In one of his early columns (May 29,2004), Kristof was so outraged by the silence of Muslim leaders that he asked, "Do they care about dead Muslims only when the killers are Israelis or Americans?" Two years later, he asked in an April 23, 2006, column, "And where is the Arab press? Isn't the murder of 300,000 or more Muslims almost as offensive as a Danish cartoon?" Six months later, Kristof pursued this line on NBC's Today show: "The question is, why are Muslims who, in their -- in the Quran, who are taught that killing is wrong, it's against Allah, why are they not stepping up, and telling Muslims who are killing other Muslims, to stop?"

The incessant advocacy effort led Americans to view Darfur as a place where evil lived, and they related to Darfur as humans and not as citizens. Americans put the Iraq war in the category of a tax while saving Darfur became a charity. In effect Darfur supplanted the sort of anti-war activism that would have been expected on the basis of the US Vietnam War politics of the 60s and 70s.

The Darfur Cause is a dangerous form of feel-good politics, which must be challenged because of the damage in does in both the USA and also the Sudan, which respectively require rational foreign policy and political reform more than either country needs a morality drama.

Sudan and Darfur Blog Entry List

• MSM Monitor: Arabs Welcome African War Criminal
  
• Analyzing Darfur's Conflict of Definitions
• The Rush to Nazify Sudan by U.S. Academics
• ICC Prosecutor Ocampo Incites Genocide?
• Bostonians Learn About Darfur
• Sun. Aug. 10 Darfur Meeting Report
• Israel-Incited "Genocide" in Darfur?
• Followup: Israel-Incited "Genocide" in Darfur?
• If you liked Iraq, you will love Sudan
• 5th Question: Darfur
• Eric Cohen vs. Eric Cohen
• Profiteering from humanitarianism
• Poisoning Human Rights Discourse
• Killing Muslims Under Humanitarian Cover
• Harvard Supports Incinerating Arab Countries
• Singing HaTikvah while inciting a disastrous US invasion
• The Neocon Program to Incinerate Arab and Muslim Countries
• USHMM: National Thought Control
• Rethinking Early Islamic History

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MSM Monitor: Arabs Welcome African War Criminal

MSM Monitor provides an excellent summary of Western hypocrisy about Sudan in the article entitled Arabs Welcome African War Criminal but fails to mention that Gloria White-Hammond has been brown-nosing racist Jewish Zionists for a long time and has been blessed by the organized Jewish community in a quid pro quo for her efforts. Sphere: Related Content

U.S. Media and Israel: Censored by the New York Times: The Story Behind a Political Cartoon that the Publisher didn’t want you to see

For the complete blog entry from the cartoonist, click here.

For Phil Weiss's discussion, click here.

When the day of reckoning finally comes, NY Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. (Pinch) will almost certainly be at the head of the line of racist Zionist media magnates stripped of assets and imprisoned for aiding and abetting Zionist terrorism and for seditious conspiracy against the United States of America.
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Stephen Walt: Talking to Hamas?

Why the Oslo Process Failed

In Talking to Hamas? Harvard Professor Stephen Walt writes:

The same principle applies here. Back in 1993, when the Oslo peace process began, only about 15 percent of the Palestinian population backed Hamas. Then Israel, the United States, and the PLO squandered the historic opportunity that Oslo afforded. Israel continued to expand its settlements, the United States put no pressure on it to stop and mismanaged the negotiations (especially at Camp David in 2000), and the Palestinian Authority remained deeply corrupt and made its own share of blunders, too. George W. Bush made the problem worse on his watch, refusing to engage in the peace process and letting Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert do pretty much whatever they wanted.

The result?: Hamas grew more and more popular, and eventually won the Palestinian legislative elections in January 2006. According to Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki, the recent assault on Gaza seems to have increased their popularity even more. Bottom line: If we didn't want to have to deal with Hamas, we should have been following a different policy for the past 15 years.

Because Professor Walt does not speak Hebrew, does not -- as far as I know -- have inside connections into the Israeli government or military, and does not have a particularly deep knowledge either of Israeli or E. European Jewish history, he misses the major issue that impeded success of the Oslo negotiation even if the Israeli government entered the process in good faith and even if the US government were willing to "jawbone" the Zionist side of the negotiations.

Oslo failed because the immigration of ~1 million former Soviet Jews gave both senior Israeli government officials and also the more important leaders of Judonia the feeling that they no longer had to worry so seriously about the "demographic problem."

In addition, even though the Israel Lobby (the public face of Judonia) routinely compares him to someone that published Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Professor Walt completely misunderstands the meaning of the reference to the Protocols in the Hamas Charter when he writes in his blog entry:

Of course, talking to Hamas is unappealing for several obvious reasons. As Cohen notes, the Hamas charter contains a number of truly "vile" elements, including some odious anti-Semitic declarations. For Hamas to invoke a discredited forgery like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is both offensive and ignorant, and it weakens their claim to be taken seriously as a political movement. And then there's the moral hazard problem: If we start talking to Hamas, do we encourage other extremist groups to think they can get recognition too if they hold out long enough?

Here are my relevant blog entries:

• Was Fr. Coughlin an Anti-Semite?
• Stephen Walt: New Father Coughlin??

Here is the relevant text from the first blog entry.

Article 32 of the Charter states:

The Zionist plan is limitless. After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates. When they will have digested the region they overtook, they will aspire to further expansion, and so on. Their plan is embodied in the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying.

The Charter probably cites the Protocols under the assumption that it must contain information about Zionist goals.

Article 32 in fact is evidence of the insignificance of the Protocols and European anti-Semitism as sources of Palestinian, Arab or Muslim animosity towards the State of Israel.

In fact, I have never met a Palestinian or Muslim that has actually read it. I once gave a copy to a Palestinian friend, but she confessed that she found it too boring to read.

I have scoured several versions of the Protocols in English, Russian, Polish, and German. None include a discussion of the borders of the Jewish settlement in Palestine, but the Introduction to the 1922 edition entitled WORLD CONQUEST THROUGH WORLD GOVERNMENT, PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION, tries to fit Zionism into the conspiratorial framework described by the Protocols without any discussion of the ultimate or intended borders of the Zionist State.

The Hamas Charter is really referring to the Borders of Destiny (Gvulot Ye`ud/Yi`ud), which were clearly defined in standard Zionist geography textbooks of the Mandatory period. (See The Borders of Destiny.)]

In any case, as I often point out, it makes no sense for the US government or anyone that supports Zionism or the continued existence of the State of Israel to accuse Hamas of extremism, for it is so far beyond extreme that it is psychotic to believe that Eastern European ethnic Ashkenazim had the right to steal Palestine from the native population on the basis of an etymological relationship between the word "Jew" and the word "Judea" that it is psychotic.

By Zionist reasoning one could argue that the Irish have the right to ethnically cleanse and steal Rome because the Irish mostly practice the Roman Catholic religion, which contains the word "Roman" in its name.

If we had any sort of rational or realistic political or foreign policy discourse in the USA, we would be discussing which asylums would be best for treating Zionists and not giving them high positions in the US government.

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Finally, Talking the Lobby’s Role in America

My wife Karin wrote today's opinion column for The Khaleej Times. Sphere: Related Content