1. Over at Good Jew Central Dimi Reider is displeased that a number of his compatriots in uniform cheer, holler and show every sign of being pleased by the destruction of a number of buildings in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead.
Continue reading ‘Good Jew Central, Warfare And Nazi Germany’
Over at The Tablet and in the context of the attempt to bomb synagogues in Chicago Lee Smith writes:
Terror, violence, and bloodshed against Jews now come pre-packaged with a sanctimonious justification. It’s not seen as crazy, sick, irrational violence. It’s political violence. Terrorist violence is irrational and incomprehensible-unless the victims are Jewish. Why do terrorists bomb America, bomb London, bomb Madrid, bomb Casablanca, burn Mumbai? Because they’re crazy, that’s why. With the Jews, well, there’s the occupation. There’s Israel. There’s America’s support for Israel. Terrorism may be abhorrent, but when it comes to the Jews the terrorists themselves have a lot to be angry about. Accordingly, we’re supposed to regard these acts with both horror and reason at the same time-”sure, it’s not pretty, but we get it.” In other words, terror against Jews may produce violence and bloodshed, but not moral revulsion.
Mondoweiss has reported the death of Tony Judt. I daresay they’d know. As good a moment as any to recall that he regarded Jews as morally unfit for self-government and warned that the Jews as a whole might have to suffer as a result of the alleged crimes of some individual Jews.
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.
Apart from being Jewish and having lost family members in the Holocaust (why that should bestow insight on anyone’s analysis of Middle East history and politics I don’t know but it seems to be the case), Tony Judt’s chief claim to credibility as a critic of Israel is that he is a renowned historian of modern Europe and is therefore, one would imagine, capable of getting his facts right and arguing in a rigorous and convincing manner.
I’m not a resident of the United States and I have a couple of question for Z Word readers who do live there: are intelligent people in the US who take an interest in such matters generally unaware that there have always been Jews that opposed Jewish nationhood and, in particular, that some 20th century Jewish intellectuals like Hannah Arendt (when she wasn’t busy making excuses for Martin Heidegger) were scathingly critical of Israel? Has this information been excluded from public debate? Does mentioning these facts here make me courageous? By mentioning them now do I risk the wrath of AIPAC?
Continue reading ‘Judith Butler and Anti-Zionist Charlatanry’
Seth Freedman is a regular in the role of Acceptable Jew at The Guardian’s CiF website. In this piece he looks at the controversy surrounding the allegations of organ harvesting fom dead Palestinians leveled at the IDF in a Swedish newspaper. He concludes that it’s all Israel’s fault, naturally.
Continue reading ‘The Swedish Scandal: Freedman Blames Bad Jews’
In an excellent post which we have already linked to here, Eve Garrard looks at the rise of the new, cool, politically-correct antisemitism and some possible ways of dealing with it.
Continue reading ‘The New Antisemitism: Sharpening the Debate’
David Hirsh responds to the absurd attack on him penned by Jacqueline Rose and Antony Lerman (you can read my own debate with Lerman here.)
Continue reading ‘Antisemitism: Hirsh Responds to Rose and Lerman’
Juan Gelman is a distinguished Argentine poet. In 2007 he was awarded the Premio Cervantes, the most important prize awarded for literature in the Spanish language. Gelman devoted a good part of his youth and middle age to participation various revolutionary Peronist organizations and was obliged to flee the country during the 1976 - 1983 military dictatorship. In recent years, as well as his work as a poet, he has devoted himself to fulminating in the press against what he regards as the two principle founts of evil in the world: the United States of America and Israel.
Globes, the Israeli business daily, reports that the Histadrut trade union intends to ask the International Transport Workers Federation (ITF) for assistance with the planned boycott of Israeli ships by dockers in South Africa. “The union in South Africa is against anything connected to Israel, and in the past even objected to a cooperation agreement we signed with the Palestinian transport workers union,” the paper quotes Transport Workers Union chairman Avi Edri as saying.
This is a guest post by Karl Pfeifer, a veteran anti-fascist and journalist based in Vienna.
I first met Paula Abrams at the “Republikanischer Klub,” a club founded in 1986 by Austrian intellectuals to fight the antisemitic campaign of Kurt Waldheim, who became president of Austria.
There is a Holocaust abuse tactic that is really only available to Jewish anti-Zionists. Norman Finkelstein, the author of the “The Holocaust Industry,” often uses it. Gerald Kaufman, a British Member of Parliament, has started using it. Basically, it works like this: if your parents or grandparents perished in or survived the Holocaust, you invoke them when venting anger against Israel.
According to the police, the violence in Oslo which followed an attack on a pro-Israel demonstration on Thursday was the worst the Norwegian capital has seen since the 1980s.
This is a guest post by Michelle Sieff, Assistant Director of the American Jewish Committee’s Africa Institute.
The South African Palestinian Solidarity Committee (PSC) - which includes several self-described “prominent” South Africans, among them former Intelligence Services Minister Ronnie Kasrils, Professor Steven Friedman of the University of Johannesburg, Patrick Craven of the Cosatu trade union federation, and Eddie Makue, the General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches - has strongly denounced Israel’s attack on Hamas targets in Gaza. The group has called on the South African government to sever diplomatic relations with Israel and impose sanctions as well.
Continue reading ‘Gaza: From the Apartheid Analogy to “Genocide”’
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