Omar Barghouti is a leading advocate of BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) against Israel and a key figure in PACBI (the Palestinian Campaign for an Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel). If his latest article on the execrable Counterpunch website is anything to go by, Barghouti is worried that some boycotters are getting cold feet.
Continue reading ‘Antisemitism Lies at the Heart of the Boycott Movement’
I’ve already looked at a theory about what might be delaying the beatification of Pope Pius XII and I have now come across an even more advanced example of it here. The theory, briefly but not unfairly put, holds that the only thing that is holding the former Pope back from beatification and later becoming a saint is the antipathy of the Jews towards him and their over influence the Vatican.
Over at Normblog you’ll find the latest installment of Sam Fleischacker’s series “A Cool Hour on the Israel-Palestine Conflict” here. You’ll find my comments on previous installments behind these numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. On this occasion Fleischacker deals with questions relating to nationalism and, once again, I’m in agreement with the thrust of what he says. There follow some variations on points he raises.
Continue reading ‘A Response To “A Cool Hour on the Israel-Palestine Conflict 7 ”’
This is a guest post by Karl Pfeifer, a veteran anti-fascist and journalist based in Vienna.
Antisemitism is tolerated in Hungary - and not only in its crudest form, as when a uniformed rabble marches in the streets or when Neo-Nazis provoke Jews in front of their synagogues. It is also part and parcel of Hungarian right wing politics. Usually antisemitism is coded, but the code is very simple. Here is just one recent example.
Continue reading ‘“The cosmopolitan-parasite class…”: Antisemitism in Hungary’
On July 18th, 1994, a bomb killed 85 people at the AMIA Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires. The investigation into the worst single terrorist crime in Argentine history was cack-handed where it was not corrupt and no one has ever been successfully prosecuted for it.
With attention fixed on the academic boycott campaign in the UK - see Engage for a report on how the boycotters are misrepresenting the UCU’s current legal wrangles as an assault on freedom of speech - it’s worth remembering that academic anti-Zionism is a major problem in other countries too. Like Australia.
Via Engage, which has valiantly marshalled both the arguments and the bodies to confront the UCU’s academic boycott, comes news that court action is imminent.
Writing in Beirut’s Daily Star newspaper, leading Palestinian intellectual and Al Quds University President Sari Nusseibeh runs through the reasons why the “one-state solution” is enjoying a revival. Nusseibeh, however, is emphatic in his rejection of a unitary state between the Mediterranean and the River Jordan.
Continue reading ‘Sari Nusseibeh Rejects the “One-State Solution”’
Is the recent agreement between North Korea and the United States, whereby the latter took the former off its list of countries that support terrorism in exchange for the former reopening access to its nuclear facilities, a model for a future settlement of the nuclear standoff between Iran and those countries who don’t want it to develop nuclear weapons? The answer is no, because the two countries are very different from each other and they have very different aims in their negotiations with the outside world.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson is known for his careless mouth - remember that recent remark about what he’d do to a certain part of Barack Obama’s anatomy? Such free association has often landed him in fights with the Jewish community. These tend to follow a pattern. He says something outrageous (for example, back in 1984, he referred to New York as “hymietown” in a conversation with a journalist,) a furore follows, he eventually apologizes, there is both hope and expectation that it won’t happen again, and then…it happens again.
This is a guest post by Karl Pfeifer, a veteran anti-fascist and journalist based in Vienna.
UPDATE, OCTOBER 16: Haider’s successor has confirmed that Haider was drunk - very drunk - when he crashed his car.
The Austrian papers are full of pictures of the suntanned politician Jörg Haider, who was a man for all seasons and who learned the lesson from American politicians to always smile and to shake hands with everybody. If one could believe some newspapers and some declarations of the Austrian political elite, a sort of Austrian Mother Teresa has passed away. The former Social Democrat Heinz Fischer, who is now President of Austria, described Haider’s death as a “human tragedy.”
Continue reading ‘Jörg Haider: A Leader Who Died As He Lived’
Noel Ignatiev is one the last people you would expect to be authoring an entry on Zionism for an encyclopedia published under a well-known, trusted imprint. But open Volume 3 of the “Encyclopedia of Race and Racism,” which carries the names of both Macmillan Reference USA (now owned by the Michigan-based Gale, Cengage Learning company) and the Macmillan Social Science Library, and you will see that he has done just that.
Continue reading ‘Macmillan USA Encyclopedia Damns Zionism as Racism’
Over at Normblog you’ll find the latest installment of Sam Fleischacker’s series “A Cool Hour on the Israel-Palestine Conflict” here. You’ll find my comments on previous installments behind these numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. On this occasion Fleischacker deals with questions relating to the idea of collective ownership of particular territories.
Continue reading ‘A Response To “A Cool Hour on the Israel-Palestine Conflict 6”’
David Owen is a former foreign minister of the UK and there is an article of quite astonishing stupidity by him in today’s Times. It’s about the possibility that Israel might choose to deal with Iran’s nuclear ambitions by means of an air attack. What follows is just a sample of the delights it contains.
Over at Normblog, there’s a great post by Eve Gerrard in which she goes to work on certain arguments against Zionism.
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