A petition to free Vincent Reynouard, a French denier, who is serving a prison sentence and to abrogate the Gayssot Act was initiated by two foremost “experts” on the famous Jewish/Zionist Lobby: Paul-Eric Blanrue and Jean Bricmont (Jean Bricmont is Belgian, he is a professor at the Catholic University of Louvain). The petition has so far been signed by 1,000 people - not a great success. The initiators are proud that it has Noam Chomsky’s backing. This is the letter he wrote :
Some Israeli commentators seem to be developing a curious distaste for national self-determination and the rights and burdens it brings with it. Take Yossi Gurvitz, for example. His article starts with a consideration of a recent survey of attitudes to Jews in Spain and his first paragraph concludes like this:
Anyone who still believes that a single state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River can be brought about without exterminating and expelling the vast majority of Jews living in the territory should watch this sordid little fantasy about the “liberation” of Tel Aviv, courtesy of the genocidaires of Hamas.
Regular readers will be familiar with Luis D’Elía. Ample of girth and firm of opinion, he’s an energetic social activist and a prominent supporter of the government of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. However, Luis is feeling a bit unloved these days and thinks his position at the court of the government’s most uncompressing loyalists is being undermined by the machinations of certain elements in the media (guess which ones?), elements that are denying him and his followers the coverage he thinks they deserve.
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:
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.
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?
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.
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.”
