Imagine that you are a distinguished academic, a sociologist say, or a historian. You have a nice job in an American university, your family background is Catholic Polish and though you are well known to experts in your own area of study the broader public has never heard of you.
Archive for August, 2010
Via Honest Reporting:
On September 30, 2000, The New York Times, Associated Press and other major media outlets published a photo of a young man — bloodied and battered — crouching beneath a club-wielding Israeli policeman. The caption identified him as a Palestinian victim of Israeli brutality – with the clear implication that the Israeli soldier was the one who beat him.
That young man was, in fact, Tuvia Grossman, a Jewish student from Chicago, who was beaten within inches of his life before being rescued by the Israeli border policeman in the photo.
The resulting outrage generated by the gross distortion of the photo “launched” Honest Reporting.
Now, ten years later, we caught up with Tuvia in an exclusive interview.
The resulting outrage generated by the gross distortion of the photo “launched” Honest Reporting.Regular readers of this blog will know that we have repeatedly argued against the usefulness of the Northern Ireland analogy applied to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Nevertheless, like the corpse of a drowned dog, it keeps bobbing to the surface again and again. The latest example is by Ali Abunimah in the New York Times. With a deep sigh and a heavy step I’ll now proceed to take it apart.
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) representatives visited Sudan this week to discuss the African nation’s plans to build at least one nuclear reactor by 2020. The ambitious scheme, which oil-producing Sudan claims would be purely for civil use to produce electricity, is the latest in Arab nuclear initiatives, paralleling Iran’s highly controversial program.
The view is widely held that Turkey is ruled by a moderate Islamist party, the AKP, that is committed to democracy and integration with Europe and that it is the old secular elite that stands in the way of modernization and human rights. Many also believe that the decline in Israel’s previously good relations with Turkey can be explained entirely by Israel’s assault on the Mavi Marmara.
Continue reading ‘Foreign Illusions About Turkey And The AKP’
Now, with active prodding by President Obama, including individual White House meetings with Abbas and Netanyahu in July, the Palestinian leader found that he could no longer remain unresponsive to the West’s entreaties to accept Israel’s continual overtures to return to direct talks, lest the Palestinians be perceived, correctly, as the obstacle to peace.Mahmoud Abbas, however, may be able to salvage his strategy. The one-year timeline the U.S. set to conclude direct talks creates an aura of expectation, but also conveys to Abbas that he has more time to be indecisive, with all the perils that entails.
From my latest op-ed on Fox News, here.
In the 1930s, the exiled Trotsky began to take an interest in both the Arab-Jewish conflict and Zionist colonization in Palestine. Unlike the orthodox Stalinists, he was distrustful of the “reactionary Muslim” and “anti-Semitic pogromist” elements in the Palestinian Arab national movement. Unlike the Trotskyists of today, he did not uncritically whitewash the Palestinian riots of 1929 as a revolutionary “liberation” struggle. Indeed, by 1937, though he never became a Zionist, Trotsky had come to radically revise his earlier standpoint on the “Jewish question.” He recognized, for example, that his earlier belief in the inevitability of assimilation was unfounded; that there was a Jewish nation, which required a territorial base; and that the Soviet regime was shamelessly encouraging anti-Semitism to deflect attention from its own failures.
The always insightful Robert Wistrich describes the evolution of Leon Trotsky’s thinking on that topic of discussion known as “The Jewish Question.” Read it all here.
Wistrich adds:
In the West, his legacy is kept alive by the amorphous Fourth International - a motley crew of Trotskyite groups whose sectarianism, internal dissension, sterile scholastic disputes and personal rivalries are legendary.
You know what’s coming now, don’t you…
And if you just can’t sit through that scene again, remember this jaunty little number?
Michael Collins isn’t a name that will mean much to many readers of this blog. For present purposes it will suffice to say that he was a key figure in the War of Independence that led to Ireland winning its freedom from Great Britain. He was shot dead in an ambush during the Irish Civil War 88 years ago today.
Continue reading ‘Michael Collins, 88 Years and Burying the Past’
One of the most vicious anti-Zionist propagandists subsidized by the late, unlamented Soviet Union was a man named Trofim Kichko. The author of an antisemitic tract called “Judaism Without Embellishments,” Kichko would doubtless have approved of this photograph which the irredeemably blockheaded Max Blumenthal has posted on his Facebook page:
Kichko wrote:
Continue reading ‘Max Blumenthal Revives Soviet Antisemitism’
Writing in the New York Times Charles M. Blow says that,
While Jews are only 2 percent of the United States population, their influence outweighs their proportion.
Well said, Charles. Perhaps you might like to devote your next column to saying what measures you think ought to be taken to reduce Jewish influence. Limit Jewish participation in higher education? Make Jews who run for Congress pass a loyalty test? Make one non-Jewish vote count for two Jewish ones in swing states? The possibilities are endless. (Via Phoebe)
They’re calling it the yarmulkeh goal - because when Hapoel Tel Aviv striker Itay Schechter scored his team’s third in a 3-2 victory over Salzburg in this week’s Champion’s League qualifier, he celebrated not by crossing himself or tearing off his shirt, but by donning a Hapoel TA skullcap. Schechter received a yellow card as a result. Hapoel manager Eli Guttman said: “I don’t have a problem with Christian players who cross themselves after they score so why shouldn’t Shechter pray the way he wants to.”
Here’s the goal itself: note the precision in avoiding the offside position and the truly exquisite finish.
My latest article on the Huffington Post examines the extraordinary and shocking case of Cliona Campbell, a young woman being victimized by anti-Zionist thugs.
Noam Sheizaf and Larry Derfner are worried about the possibility that Israel might attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. No surprise there. What sensible person could contemplate such an idea with equanimity? However, both of them fall into the trap of assuming that all the risks are stacked on the side of attacking and none on the side of not taking military action.
Continue reading ‘Sheizaf, Derfner And What Deterrence Means’
First-class reporting from BBC Panorama’s Jane Corbin, in Death in the Med. Says one commenter on Panorama’s website, “Another demonstration of how the pro-Palestinian lobby has been foiled again, let’s all cry Israel’s disproportionate violence and then show the truth. Jenin sounds familiar.”
Exactly. Now watch both parts of the program below.
