1.
The present and previous presidents of Argentina have both stood up at the UN General Assembly and politely requested that the government of Iran extradite the AMIA massacre suspects it is sheltering.
Author Archive for Eamonn McDonagh
El Páis of Madrid is a wonderful newspaper. In the lead editorial of today’s edition it fearlessly condemns the supposed assassination by Israel of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.
As well as being legally reprehensible and morally unacceptable the policy of selective assassination, or to put it another way, the dirty war only contributes to the illusion that there are alternative solutions to the one that Israel will sooner or later have to face: an end to the occupation and the opening of talks with the Palestinians on the basis of a two state solution.
Ariel Ilan Roth maintains that Israel’s objection to Iran acquiring nuclear weapons is not based on a fear that those weapons would be used against it as he believes that the certainty of a devastating Israeli response is likely to deter the ayatollahs.
As readers of this blog know, Roger Cohen is not a wise man. His latest column in the New York Times gives further evidence of this.
Domestic U.S. politics constrain innovative thought - even open debate - on the process without end that is the peace search.
Continue reading ‘Roger Cohen And Wishful Thinking, Part 974′
By way of Engage, I came across this excellent interview with Moishe Postone which I commend it to your attention. I have a quibble though and it’s about the very first thing he says:
It is true that the Israeli government uses the charge of anti-semitism to shield it from criticisms.
Continue reading ‘Moishe Postone, Antisemitism And Star Trek’
I received an e-mail circular from B’Tselem today about Israel’s policies towards Gaza. The first substantial argument offered is this:
“The siege of Gaza is causing enormous suffering among innocents, and it’s hard to see how that deprivation can be justified,” said Uri Zaki, B’Tselem’s USA Director. “International law, as well as basic human and Israeli values, demands that Israel do its utmost to address its legitimate security concerns without inflicting unnecessary harm to the civilians of Gaza. The current policy doesn’t come close to meeting that standard.” Gazans’ rights to minimal standards of food security, shelter, health, education and to travel are protected under international law. These needs should not be held hostage to security and political issues.
1
Yesterday I reviewed Bridget Kevane’s ignorant and ill-intentioned attempt to besmirch the memory Jacobo of Timerman. Today I’m going to take a look at her hatchet job on Argentina in general and its current ambassador it Washington in particular, a text in which she gets in a few final swipes at Timmerman along the way.
1.
Many readers will be familiar with the name of the Argentine journalist and publisher Jacobo Timerman. Kidnapped and tortured by agents of the 1976-1983 dictatorship, he was eventually allowed to leave for Israel where he wrote a book, Prisoner Without A Name, Cell Without A Number that was to become a classic account of the horrors of military rule in Argentina.
Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff have a piece here in which they assess Operation Cast Lead a year after its conclusion. They acknowledge that,
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) penetrated to the heart of the strip — the center of Gaza City, where most of Hamas’s major compounds are located. The organization’s defensive infrastructure, which had been painstakingly built over three years and included hundreds of booby-trapped houses, tunnels, landmines, and smuggled anti-tank rockets, was destroyed.
Hamas fighters had no answer for the IDF’s technological and military edge. Their attempts to kidnap Israeli soldiers failed and, though Hamas fired hundreds of rockets into Israeli territory, only a few civilians were killed. More than a year after the fighting, the strip is still under siege by both Israel and Egypt. Most Gazans are forbidden from traveling abroad, while their supply of goods depends primarily on smuggling through tunnels from Egypt.
Gideon Levy has a piece here in which he berates the government of Israel for sending ministers abroad to participate in ceremonies marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day. He does this because he regards it as nothing more than cheap propaganda and an attempt to distract attention from criticism of Israel arising out of its policies towards Gaza and, especially, Operation Cast Lead. He writes:
The British writer Will Self has an essay here about his late German colleague W. G. Sebald’s writing about the Holocaust. In it he objects to the existence of Holocaust Memorial Day in the UK and rejects the idea of the Holocaust being remembered at all. He writes,
Continue reading ‘British Writer Rejects Holocaust Commemoration’
Some readers of this blog must have experience of trying to get a work permit in a foreign country. I’ve had to do this myself on a number of occasions and it usually involved a dreadful amount of bureaucracy and no small number of arbitrary and incomprehensible decisions. Like most people in this situation it never occurred to me that because I’m a decent bloke and had the best of intentions towards my host country that I had some sort of right to a work permit. I knew that it was up to the country concerned to decide on what basis it wanted to let me enter its territory, if it wanted to let me in at all.
Here’s a quick test of your ability to spot antisemitic talk when confronted with it. Please read the following text:
You’re a Jewish son of a bitch and I’m going to kill you. You’re a con man, just like your family and the rest of the Jews, Hitler ought to have killed you all, never mind, I’ll be out in six months for having acted in the heat of the moment […] Yes, I’m antisemitic and xenophobic […] I want the money tomorrow.
Continue reading ‘The Two Eduardos And An Unfortunate Choice of Words’
Support the relief effort here. Support Israel’s soldiers here.
Ben Cohen adds: Since my post on Thursday asking for reader donations, the deal toll in Haiti has climbed still higher, with current estimates hovering at around 100,000. The toll is likely to escalate as more corpses are pulled from the wreckage and as survivors deal with malnutrition, lack of clean drinking water, water-borne diseases and other horrors. So please, give as generously as you can. Football/futbol/soccer fans among you might also want to purchase one of these T-Shirts - all proceeds to earthquake relief.
There’s a long article here about the British historian Tony Judt and from it I’d like to focus on the following paragraph:
Judt was born into a lower-middle-class Jewish family of Marxist anti-Communists. They lived in London’s East End, a historically Jewish section of the city. “Anti-Semitism at a low, polite, cultural level was still perfectly acceptable,” Judt recalls. Fearing that their teenage son was too socially withdrawn, his parents, in 1963, sent him to a summer camp on a kibbutz in Israel. Judt became a committed Zionist. “I was the ideal convert,” he says. A leader in left-wing Zionist youth movements, he even delivered a keynote address at a large Zionist conference in Paris when he was only 16 years old. [… ]In 1967, a few weeks after the Six-Day War, Judt volunteered as a translator for the Israel Defense Forces on the Golan Heights. He was surprised to find that many of the young Israeli officers he worked with were “right-wing thugs with anti-Arab views”; others, he says, “were just dumb idiots with guns.” Israel, he came to believe, “had turned from a sort of narrow-minded pioneer society into a rather smug, superior, conquering society.”
Continue reading ‘Tony Judt: Anti-Zionist as Disillusioned Convert’
