Here’s a tremendous story from The Brooklyn Paper, right here in New York City:
Local Jewish leaders and anti-Israel protesters faced off on Montague Street - again - on Tuesday, holding a raucous debate over whether West Bank-made lotions sold at Ricky’s cosmetics shop support Israel’s “illegal” occupation of the embattled region.
In the end, the boycott supporters ended up actually promoting the Ahava products, as Brooklyn Heights residents flocked to Ricky’s with their wallets open.
“I came in when I saw the flags - I think [the boycotters] are absurd,” said Ginger Berman, who bought a tub of Ahava bath salts. “There are so many other big issues to protest, why this?”
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 :
In the 1930s, the exiled Trotsky began to take an interest in both the Arab-Jewish conflict and Zionist colonization in Palestine. Unlike the orthodox Stalinists, he was distrustful of the “reactionary Muslim” and “anti-Semitic pogromist” elements in the Palestinian Arab national movement. Unlike the Trotskyists of today, he did not uncritically whitewash the Palestinian riots of 1929 as a revolutionary “liberation” struggle. Indeed, by 1937, though he never became a Zionist, Trotsky had come to radically revise his earlier standpoint on the “Jewish question.” He recognized, for example, that his earlier belief in the inevitability of assimilation was unfounded; that there was a Jewish nation, which required a territorial base; and that the Soviet regime was shamelessly encouraging anti-Semitism to deflect attention from its own failures.
The always insightful Robert Wistrich describes the evolution of Leon Trotsky’s thinking on that topic of discussion known as “The Jewish Question.” Read it all here.
Wistrich adds:
In the West, his legacy is kept alive by the amorphous Fourth International - a motley crew of Trotskyite groups whose sectarianism, internal dissension, sterile scholastic disputes and personal rivalries are legendary.
You know what’s coming now, don’t you…
And if you just can’t sit through that scene again, remember this jaunty little number?
The whatboutery dispute, therefore, comes down to this. One side subscribes to the universality of human rights and urges two conclusions. Firstly, more equitable distribution of popular concern across the myriad human rights crises in the world. Secondly, greater awareness that the internal character of a regime - whether it’s a democracy or a tyranny - will tell you a great deal about how responsive it will be to human rights complaints.
The other side filters everything through the idea of Empire - including the ICC. If you regard the ICC as a tool of a sinister global conspiracy, there is no need to examine its status as a “court of last resort,” and therefore particularly appropriate for those states which lack robust, transparent judicial systems.
But they probably won’t. And one reason lies in this helpful explanation emailed by a reader on the political context around the Oakland picket: “The west coast longshoremen are part of an independent union that was expelled from its parent union and from the AFL-CIO for being completely controlled by the Communist Party. Its leader, Harry Bridges, now deceased, was in fact a high-ranking member of the CPUSA. A key reason why the California “bay area” (SF-Oakland-Berkeley) has long been a bastion of all manner of Leftist causes (e.g., Black Panther Party) is because of the steady backing that the Commie-dominated Longshoreman gave to them.”
UPDATE: As pointed out in the comments, Tiran’s original video has disappeared, but there’s a new one which I’ve posted above.
Via Terry Glavin. More on Libby Davies, deputy leader and house leader of the opposition New Democratic Party in Canada, here.
ENOUGH
by Matt Godwin and Sam Konig
You have no doubt been reading about recent comments made by the NDP’s Deputy Leader, Libby Davies, who stated very clearly at an anti-Israel rally that the occupation of the Palestinian territories began in 1948, rather than in 1967. This kind of rhetoric is tantamount to declaring that Israel has no right to exist at all. As if this were not enough, she further declared her support for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against Israel. Many progressives and fellow New Democrats, including the NDP’s other Deputy Leader Thomas Mulcair, have condemned her remarks.
First-class reporting from German broadcaster Südwestrundfunk below. The members of the German leftist party Die Linke don’t seem remotely bothered that they were traveling with the Islamist IHH “charity,” nor with the fascist, antisemitic BBP Party. Once again, the sordid nature of the alliance between Islamists and so-called leftists is plain for all to see.
To find journalist-ideologue John Pilger ranting about “the criminality of the Israeli state” and “the murderous, racist toll of Zionism” is all too routine. (Hat tip Oliver Kamm.) What’s new is this: Pilger trots out “the expatriate Israeli musician Gilad Atzmon” as a representative good Jew, emblematic of “the heroes of Israel” and “the moral courage of Israeli dissidents.” Either Pilger is fool enough to be unaware of Atzmon’s vicious anti-Jewish bigotry, or he has consciously praised an apologist for the Third Reich, who has declared: Continue reading ‘John Pilger and the Enabling of Antisemitism’
“If western feminists who have staked out a ‘troops out’ position remembered to ask Afghan women their views, they would find that rather than bristling at ‘masculine militarization,’ ‘cultural imperialism,’ or any other in-vogue sin found on the placards waved at rallies, many Afghan women are haunted by the memory of the Taliban’s public stoning to death of women,” write Wazhma Frogh and Lauryn Oates in a superb piece for The Calgary Herald. Read it in full here. Via Terry Glavin, whose commitment to the principles of genuine solidarity and internationalism never wavers.
Today is May Day, the holiday most of the world marks as international workers’ day. North Americans call it Labour Day and celebrate it on the first Monday in September, usually without much of a thought about its meaning, but it’s the same holiday.
This Sunday, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ), the New York-based activist group, will dedicate part of its weekly WBAI radio program Beyond the Pale to a live reading of Caryl Churchill’s play Seven Jewish Children, to be followed by a discussion with the actors.
Reading the Dalai Lama’s description of Tibet transformed into a “hell on earth” as a result of the Chinese occupation got me thinking about Chas Freeman again. But let me leave it to Michael Weiss to explain why.
John Pilger and the Enabling of Antisemitism
This is a guest post by David Adler.
To find journalist-ideologue John Pilger ranting about “the criminality of the Israeli state” and “the murderous, racist toll of Zionism” is all too routine. (Hat tip Oliver Kamm.) What’s new is this: Pilger trots out “the expatriate Israeli musician Gilad Atzmon” as a representative good Jew, emblematic of “the heroes of Israel” and “the moral courage of Israeli dissidents.” Either Pilger is fool enough to be unaware of Atzmon’s vicious anti-Jewish bigotry, or he has consciously praised an apologist for the Third Reich, who has declared:
Continue reading ‘John Pilger and the Enabling of Antisemitism’