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:
Continue reading ‘Max Blumenthal Revives Soviet Antisemitism’
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.
Sorry BDSers. Looks like your sordid little campaign has suffered yet again. Why do you keep making claims that aren’t true, I wonder? Wouldn’t be Ahmadinejad’s influence, would it?
I have no special skills when it comes to predicting the future but I thought I might as well title this post as I have when it occurred to me that many, cough, anti-Zionists, would see three posts in four days about Iran as being a sure sign that something is up. After all, this blog is sponsored by the AJC and hey, come on, we all know what that means….
Many of the grand myths of our own time - Israel as the ultimate rogue state, U.S. policy as a hostage of the “Israel Lobby,” the Palestinians as the iconic symbol of human suffering - draw on a much older tradition that, just twenty years ago, most people regarded as a matter for historians, not chroniclers of the present. It was these myths which effectively licensed Oliver Stone’s remarks. If there is a lesson to be drawn from L’Affaire Stone, it is that he did not - and this is why his apology is really by the by - act alone.
From my latest piece for The Huffington Post.
Israel is so extraordinarily beyond the pale that its behavior does not even merit comparison with states like China, which brutally occupies Tibet, or India, which occupies Kashmir, or Poland, which stands on parts of what used to be eastern Germany, or Sri Lanka, which recently extirpated the secessionist Tamil Tiger movement after a brutal three-decades long civil war, or the United States of America, which annihilated the Native American peoples. Indeed, the only states that resemble Israel are Nazi Germany and South Africa’s apartheid regime, neither of which exists any longer. Get it?
A small taste of Lee Smith’s brilliant response to his critics, which you can read here.
Actually, he doesn’t so much exonerate himself of it as offer himself as a candidate for recognition as being righteous among the gentiles:
But my own diligence against anti-Semitism, in all its forms, in my own church in particular, is well-documented and has gone back decades.
Continue reading ‘Andrew Sullivan Exonerates Himself of Antisemitism’
Though Deputy Alcira Argumedo is not a member of the governing party, today’s Pagina/12, the Izvestia of the government of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, generously donates space to her in today’s edition of the paper. Deputy Argumedo is superficially concerned with the current spat between Venezuela and Colombia but what’s really on her mind is something else; the Jews.
Continue reading ‘It’s The Jews! Another Comforting Signal to Iran From Buenos Aires’
El País today runs yet another of its habitual anti-Israel opinion pieces. Today’s example of the genre is by Javier Valenzuela, who says that:
In the 1948 Israel was founded in more than three quarters of what had been that [British] mandate…
Over at the consistently excellent CST blog, Mark Gardner reports on a telling moment at the Palestine International Festival in Ramallah. When 70s disco icons Boney M got up to do their thing, organizers of the festival asked them not to perform their traditional floorfiller, a cover of The Melodians number, “By the Rivers of Babylon.” Why? Because the song contains the words of Psalm 137: “Yea we wept/When we remembered Zion.”
Mark writes:
Its not a sex thing or a sexism thing because “Bang Bang Lulu”, “Baby do You Wanna Bump”, “Gloria, Can you Waddle” and “Love for Sale” were ok.
Its not a colour thing or a nationalist thing, because “Brown Girl in the Ring”, “White Christmas” and “Ra Ra Rasputin” were ok.
Its not a Christian or even a Voodoo thing, because “Mary’s Boy Child”, “Hark the Herald Angel” and “Voodoonight” were ok.
It’s not an artistic merit thing, nor a flares thing, nor a…I could go on…but lets cut to the serious bit. It was a Jewish thing. Not a political thing, nor even an anti-Zionist thing, but a Jewish thing: or rather, an anti-Jewish thing.
It is one thing to demand a boycott of Israel, but it is quite another to demand a boycott of popular cultural references to the historical Jewish longing for Israel, or Zion.
Interestingly, the Jewish longing which Mark refers to, with its motifs of captivity, exile and redemption, has resonated powerfully with many black artists down the years. I have an extensive vinyl collection of classic roots and dub reggae albums from the 1970s; go through the track listings on any one of them and you are more than likely to find a song title containing the word “Zion.” Sadly, this music is apparently now verboten for the Palestinians, courtesy of their culture guardians, who are obsessed with purging anything that might legitimize the Jewish connection to the land of Israel.
Here, then, is the original version of “By the Rivers of Babylon,” by The Melodians. Enjoy.
“Walt is a throwback to the 1930s,” says Goldberg. “In the ’30s the isolationists rode the Jews as a hobby horse. They tried very hard to marginalize American citizens of the Jewish faith by questioning their loyalty. These guys don’t even understand what ancient terror they’re tapping into. What’s original, what makes this period alarming, is that The Washington Post Company would give a Jew-baiter a platform.”
From a must-read piece by Lee Smith on Tablet.
(H/T: Michael G.)
‘Bloody Jews,’ he said. ‘Bloody Jews, bugger the Jews, I’ve no sympathy for them.’I gazed at him, aghast. Where had this suddenly come from?
The encounter I’m here describing took place very recently, in the course of a large academic dinner at a University in another city, not my own one. It was a pleasant occasion, and the people at my table were innocuously and comfortably talking about sociological issues connected with the economic crisis, all completely harmless and (relatively) uncontentious. And then I heard the academic on my right hand side say to the person opposite him, ‘Bloody Jews.’
When he saw my appalled stare, he said impatiently, ‘Oh well, I’m sorry, but really…!’
‘I’m glad you’re sorry,’ I replied politely, collecting myself together for a fight. But then he asked, ‘Are you Jewish?’ When I nodded, this academic - whom I’d met for the first time that day - put his arm around me and said, ‘I’m sorry, but really Israel is terrible, the massacres, Plan Dalet, the ethniccleansing, they’re like the Nazis, they’re the same as the Nazis…’
Read more from Eve Garrard at Normblog. And then prepare for the usual whining about how it’s unfair to call these people antisemitic, they’re just critics of Israel…
Why? Read about it here. As for the response, this powerful statement from the UK Board of Deputies of British Jews says it all:
Statement from Board of Deputies and the Jewish Leadership Council: Methodist Conference
30 June 2010 - This is a very sad day, both for Jewish-Methodist relations and for everyone who wants to see positive engagement with the complex issues of Israeli-Palestinian relations. The Methodist Conference has swallowed hook, line and sinker a report full of basic historical inaccuracies, deliberate misrepresentations and distortions of Jewish theology and Israeli policy. The deeply flawed report is symptomatic of a biased process: The working group which wrote the report had already formed its conclusions at the outset. External readers were brought in to give the process a veneer of impartiality, but their criticisms were rejected. The report’s authors have abused the trust of ordinary members of the Methodist Church, who assumed that they were reading and voting on an impartial and comprehensive paper, and they have abused the goodwill of the Jewish community, which tried to engage with this issue, only to find that our efforts were treated as an unwelcome distraction. This outcome is extremely serious and damaging, as we and others have explained repeatedly over recent weeks. Israel is at the root of the identity of Jews and of Judaism, and as an expression of Jewish spiritual, national and emotional aspirations, Zionism cannot simply be ruled as illegitimate in the way that the Methodist Conference has purported to do. This smacks of breathtaking insensitivity, as crass as it is misinformed. That this position should now form the basis of Methodist Church policy should cause the Conference to hang its head in shame, just as surely as it will cause the enemies of peace and reconciliation to cheer from the sidelines.
In the Huffington Post, Hagai El-Ad has this to say:
What a long way has Israel traveled in just over six decades: from being founded on the very same year as the Declaration of Human Rights, as some form of a response to one of the most horrible crimes in human history - to becoming a state referred to by one of the Declaration’s drafters as having a “criminal government” deserving of BDS. How much goodwill, hope and optimism were destroyed along this journey, how much human suffering caused - and how difficult it will be to change course. The path leading beyond the cliff’s edge is clear and Israel’s government is propelling the country forward with eyes wide open.
This is a guest post by David Adler, jazz critic and political commentator.
More from David on this story here.
The bloggers of Mondoweiss have worked very hard to convince the public that antisemitism does not exist among the Palestine solidarity movement - indeed, that all such charges of antisemitism are mere subterfuge concocted by “Zionists” to tar critics of Israel, who are by definition pure of heart.
So it’s important to note that Mondoweiss is now voicing support for the Israeli-born, UK-based jazz musician and virulent antisemite Gilad Atzmon.
Continue reading ‘Don’t Let Atzmon Hoodwink America’s Jazz Scene’
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