I’ll confess to always having liked Pink Floyd. For anyone who attended, as I did, an English public school, you pretty much have to. And so, amongst my record collection, which spans painfully hip genres like underground techno, dub reggae and first-wave punk, a few Floyd albums can be found discreetly nestling.
At the same time, there was a part of me that found singer Roger Waters appallingly self-indulgent. Next time you listen to “Comfortably Numb,” ignore the Gilmour guitar solo and check out the lyrics. Yech.
In recent years, Waters’s upper class leftism has become increasingly strident. Now, along with other artier-than-thou types like Oliver Stone, Waters has embraced antisemitism.
Here’s a video of a recent Waters gig in Toronto. Notice how, at about 1′30″ into the ballad “Goodbye Blue Sky,” you see bombers dropping Stars of David, rapidly followed by dollar signs, followed in turn by various corporate symbols (Shell, Mercedes and so forth,) all ending in a stream of religious symbols - crosses, crescents and stars.
I need not spell out what message that sends. I will say that it is shameful. Perhaps John “Johnny Rotten” Lydon - a man who gloriously told the Israel boycotters to “f**k off” before playing Tel Aviv - was right after all.
This blanket endorsement of the BDS campaign and the PSC is a major change in TUC policy, which used to be committed to a strategy of engagement and reconciliation. No longer.
The next paragraph is clearly the result of compromise, but read it carefully: “Congress instructs the General Council to bring to Congress a report on the impact of the boycott and investment withdrawal strategy, together with the outcome of the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU)/Histadrut discussions recently facilitated by the International Trade Union Congress (ITUC) and TUC. Congress agrees to join unions around the world for maximum coordination internationally for active solidarity to end the siege of Gaza and for a free Palestine.”
…The key bit is the final sentence, which is blatantly anti-Israel. And the clue is the use of Hamas terminology – the call for a “free Palestine.”
Eric Lee of TULIP explains the latest outburst of useful idiocy in the British Trades Union Congress in The Jerusalem Post.
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 :
Arising from this post and the comments that follow it I’d like to advise readers that from now on attempts to blame antisemitic behavior on the policy or activities of the Israeli government will be referred to in this blog as examples of the Gurvitz-Goldman doctrine. The term honors Yossi Gurvitz, whose article identifying Israel as one of the main causes of antisemitism I critiqued in the post, and Lisa Goldman who vigorously defended it in the comments.
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.
Regular readers will need no introduction to Luis D’Elía. The renowned social activist and prominent supporter of the government of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner shares his thoughts with the world on Twitter and a few minutes ago he posted this:
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:
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)
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?
To those of you who can read Spanish I recommend following Luis D’Elía on Twitter. Why should he be of interest? Well, the rotund social activist is a prominent supporter of the government of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and on more than one occasion he and his followers have provided the street muscle to keep opponents of the government from holding demonstrations at sensitive locations.
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?
