THE
WORLD OF STEVEN PLAUT
By Steven Plaut, World Jewish News Agency Senior Political Analyst. Professor at Haifa University, Israel.
JUNE-JULY 2005
Alan Dershowitz Denounces DePaul Neonazi
Finkelstein
DePaul University has been in the news recently because on the one
hand it employs crackpot pseudo-historian and neonazi Holocaust Denier
Norman Finkelstein, a man who could not get any academic job at any
other institution, yet at the same time it fired Prof. Thomas Klocek
because he defended Israel to some campus student radicals.
Finkelstein is retained by DePaul, supposedly in the name of academic
free speech, in spite of his not having any scholarly credentials that
any real academic would take seriously, while Klocek was fired by the
same DePaul for making politically incorrect comments. Now Harvard
professor Alan Dershowitz has issued yet another devastating
denunciation of Finkelstein, evidently in response to the new
anti-Semitic new book that Finkelstein has crayoned. (In the past
Dershowitz has creamed Finkelstein in debates.) The book is coming out
next month, called "Beyond Chutzpah : On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism
and the Abuse of History." The title is a backhanded slap at Alan
Dershowitz's "Chutzpah." Finkelstein's theme is that just because some
hates Jews and wants to see all Jews killed is no reason to accuse
that person of being an anti-Semite. Finkelstein is a regular
Jew-basher for neonazi Holocaust Denier web sites on the lunatic Right
(including Rense.com and Holocaust "Revisionism" web sites) as well as
on fanatically anti-Semitic web sites from the Left like Counterpunch.
Dershowitz wrote the following about Finkelstein: 'Finkelstein has
said that he .can.t imagine why Israel.s apologists would be offended
by a comparison with the Gestapo. and asserted that Israel.s human
rights record is .interchangeable with Iraq.s. when it was ruled by
Saddam Hussein. He has said that most alleged Holocaust survivors -
including Elie Wiesel.have fabricated their past, are .bogus,. and
that those seeking reparations are .cheats. and .greedy.. Because of
my support of Israel, he has compared me to .Adolf Eichman [sic],. and
accused me of expressing .Nazi moral judgments.. When challenged to
defend his frequent comparison between Jews and Nazis, he has
responded, .Nazis never like to hear they.re being Nazis.. He is a
popular speaker among German neo-Nazis; one, Ingrid Rimland, whose
husband, the notorious Ernst Zundel, wrote The Hitler We Loved And
Why, even referred to him admiringly as the .Jewish David Irving. (.J.discher
David Irving.) - a reference to the British Holocaust denier and
Hitler admirer. The comparison is apt because Finkelstein has
reportedly praised the Holocaust-denying Irving as a good historian!.
and as having .made an indispensable. contribution to our knowledge of
World War II..' Commentary Magazine's Gabriel Schoenfeld has labeled
Finkelstein's views as crackpot ideas, some of them mirrored almost
verbatim in the propaganda put out by neo-Nazis around the world.. His
books do not sell in America, but they are best-sellers among the
growing number of neo-Nazis in Germany. Finkelstein has been endorsed
by anti-Semites of all stripes, including Israeli Jewish anti-Semites
like Neve Gordon from Ben Gurion University, who compared Finkelstein
ethically to the Prophets of the Bible. Finkelstein's retention at
DePaul shows that DePaul has junked all attempts at pretending to
maintain academic standards. We leave it to the reader to decide what
Neve Gordon's retention by Ben Gurion University signifies.
The Second
City's Twin Academic Neonazis
In recent months DePaul University has become something of an
international laughingstock. While retaining neonazi Norman Finkelstein
on its faculty, a person with no scholarly credentials at all and
someone who has been accused by the Anti-Defamation League of being a
Holocaust Denier, DePaul also fired Prof. Thomas Klocek because he dared
to defend Israel to some fanatic campus jihadnik students. Among those
who have denounced DePaul's neonazi has been Alan Dershowitz. Many
people are comparing DePaul's employment of Finkelstein to the
employment of another neonazi and Holocaust Denier in the Chicago area,
Arthur Butz, an Associate Professor at Northwestern University, and some
wonder aloud what is wrong with having such people on the faculty if
academic freedom is to mean anything. (We, for our part, wonder whether
there may be something in the Lake Michigan water that produces these
crackpots in the Second City!) But closer examination of the twin
Chicago "academic nazis" reveals important differences. Arthur R. Butz
is an open nazi and Holocaust Denier who crayoned a "book" insisting
that the World War II Holocaust of Jews by Germany was a grand "hoax".
Butz even touts his nazi ravings on the Northwestern University official
web site. (Interestingly, Butz and Noam Chomsky are among the main
advocates on behalf of French Holocaust Denier Robert Faurisson.) But
there the similarities with Finkelstein end. First of all, Butz teaches
in Northwestern's electric and computer engineering department, where he
teaches technical courses and does not engage in political advocacy in
his classes. Indeed, he is prohibited altogether from spouting his nazi
views on Northwestern's campus. Butz evidently does have some serious
academic credentials in his field of expertise.
So the lunacies he advocates in the
privacy of his swastika-bedecked bedroom are his own business,
believes Northwestern. We have trouble understanding why being an open
nazi does not signal to the Northwestern University brass that Butz is
deranged and so should not be on the podium at all, but we are the
first to concede that academia is crawling with other lunatics.
Finkelstein, in contrast, is not teaching a technical subject and does
not have any serious scholarly credentials in anything, yet is
permitted to use the DePaul podium to conduct his little Nuremberg
Rallies. In addition, Northwestern evidently did not know about Butz's
psychotic nazi agenda when it hired him, but DePaul knew exactly what
it was getting when it hired Finkelstein. Finkelstein had earlier been
fired from two adjunct jobs in New York due to his lack of any
scholarly credentials, his charlatan pseudo-research, his Jew-bashing
bigotry and his vicious ad hominem attacks gainst writer Elie Wiesel
and other Holocaust survivors. Finkelstein teaches in DePaul's
political science department, where he is allowed to offer a
departmental course that is completely one-sided anti-Israel
indoctrination and anti-Jewish advocacy. Finkelstein's course syllabus
consists 100% of anti-Israel propagandists and anti-Semites, some of
them Marxists. Not a single pro-Israel voice of dissent is permitted
to be aired. Where are the rights of DePaul students to hear all sides
of an issue? Why are they not being defended against Finkelstein's
podium bullying? Northwestern - by the way - has been trying to dump
Butz for years, by buying out his contract (he has tenure), but Butz
has refused. Butz is an enormous embarrassment! But DePaul's chiefs,
led by DePaul's President, Rev. Dennis H. Holtschneider, C.M., Ed.D.,
are downright PROUD of their neonazi, insisting that he is a serious
scholar (even though no serious scholars consider him one). The people
other than Brer Holtschneider who take Finklestein as a serious
researcher usually run Holocaust "Revisionism" web sites and worship
David Irving. DePaul would not hire a faculty member in the name of
free speech who was claiming that it was actually Jesus Christ who had
Pontius Pilate crucified and not the other way around, so what then is
a racist flake like Finkelstein doing teaching political science
there? If you would like to ask DePaul Prez Holtschneider yourself,
his email address is
dholtsch@depaul.edu. The Chicago Jewish Star has been commenting
at length on the Klocek affair and on DePaul's toady defense of
Finklelstein's presence on its faculty. As the Star notes: "When the
university first hired Mr. Finkelstein in 2001, his reputation as an
out-of-control, unbalanced analyst who mixes vile and vitriolic
attacks on his critics with a gleeful exhibitionism was firmly
established. With so many credible, intelligent, informed scholars of
Middle Eastern studies available from which to select, why in the
world did DePaul decide to bring this man on its staff?"
Back in February of 2003, Edward Said came to Los Angeles from the Columbia Madrassa and addressed an audience at UCLA in a speech hailed by the usual California Islamic pro-terror lobbyists. After the speech, a leftist rabbi from the Hillel at UCLA addressed Arab students at UCLA and suggested to them that they pursue peace by recognizing Israel's right to exist. Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller claimed that Said's figures in his speech were wrong and then told Arab students they must recognize the state of Israel and Jewish people before he could talk to them. Enter Yael Korin, a UCLA researcher and co-founder of Women in Black - Los Angeles. Korin attacked the left-leaning rabbi for not being sufficiently anti-Israel. She retorted that the Palestinians have already recognized the state of Israel. "It's the Israelis and Jewish people who haven't recognized the Palestinian people yet." Eavesdroppers no doubt responded with a collective "Huh?" Korin then told her friends in the Islamofascist web magazine "Muslim WakeUp!" that Seidler-Feller admonished her in Hebrew, stating she should be ashamed of herself and asking which Palestinians have recognized Jews and the state of Israel. She was unable to answer him. Who exactly is this Yael Korin? Korin may be the most visible of the ex-Israeli far-leftists comprising a small Bash-Israel Lobby in the Los Angeles area, ex-Israelis working for the destruction of Israel. There has arisen a bizarre Diaspora of fanatically anti-Israel ex-Israelis, spread about the globe, and including such people as Avi Shlaim in Britain, Gabriel Piterberg also at UCLA, Zalman Amit in Canada, Yigal Arens, a Los Angeles extremist and son of Israel's one-time Defense Minister, Gilad Atzmon, an ex-Israeli anti-Semite in Britain who has justified burning down synagogues. These people seek to see their native homeland destroyed and replaced by a "secular" state with an Arab majority (one hitch: the only visible Arab majority wants an Islamic state "from the Jordan to the sea"). Yael Korin is a co-founder of the Los Angeles branch of "Women in Black", an anti-Jewish and pro-terror propaganda organization. LA.s Women in Black routinely co-sponsor events with such outfits as the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Muslim Public Affairs Committee, and "If Americans Knew". It also promotes the beatification of Rachel Corrie, who martyred herself by stepping in front of a bulldozer to protect Palestinian terrorists. The Women in Black groups are among the initiators of efforts to "divest" from and boycott Israel. Korin herself sums up the LA-Women in Black position in these words: "Most of us do not believe that keeping (alive) a Jewish state is in agreement with this position, and that the Jewish state is an outcome of the Zionist project. So our events reflect these ideas as well." Korin is a pathologist at the medical school of UCLA, which is all more than a bit ironic because she evidently seeks to perform an autopsy on the corpse of Israel. She sees Arab terrorism as "nonviolent resistance to the violence of occupation," and has participated in panels devoted to that theme. Always the same: Jews are violent, Palestinians are victims. She is one of the people who can be counted on to endorse the Palestinian "right of return," that is the right of anyone of five million Arabs pretending to be Palestinian refugees to immigrate to Israel and overwhelm its Jewish population demographically. You know - the same "right of refugees to return" to countries they left that has never been applied to any other group of refugees, like the twelve million Germans expelled from present day Poland after the Second World War. She is a groupie of and collaborator with British "journalist" and pro-terrorism film maker John Pilger. She attends all the Bash-Israel events religiously, often dressed as an Arab. She has been labeled "Ms. PLO" Korin by some web sites. She wants the American public to pressure the American government to stop military aid to Israel because of "the flagrant injustice of Israel's disproportionate use of massive military might-including high velocity bullets, helicopter gun ships and anti-tank missiles-against a Palestinian civilian population armed mostly with stones." She also says, "We refute the view that the Palestinian Authority is responsible for initiating the current conflict." The PLO is just a group of Quakers engaged in quilting. At an MLK Day protest against Israel, Sistuh Korin declared: "This week, Israeli soldiers continue to kill adults and children in Nablus and deny Palestinian residents food and medical care. This week, Israeli bulldozers continue to destroy homes, fields and olive groves to build the apartheid wall that is stealing lands and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians." That same week, in fact, Palestinian terrorists murdered Israeli Jews.
We did an intensive web search and we
could not find a single instance of Korin speaking out against the mass
murder of Jews by Palestinian terrorists nor in favor of the right of Jews
to defend their lives against Islamofascist terror and genocide. Korin
denounced Israel for assassinating Hamas-leader Sheikh Yassin, responsible
for more than three hundred murders of Jewish civilians, many children.
She considers the very existence of her native country to be a catastrophe
(Naqba), one clearly in need of being erased. She has been active in
fomenting and organizing mutiny and insurrection among leftists serving in
the Israeli army. She denounces Israel as an "apartheid" country, whereas
in reality it is the only country in the Middle East that is NOT an
apartheid country, and she urges that Israel be boycotted. She insists
that "Zionism is the REAL Enemy of the Jews." She has also been active in
the pro-Saddam demonstrations organized by ANSWER, and is beloved by some
communist party rags. Korin is a radical feminist, except when it comes to
pro-Israel feminists. She has been one of the shrillest people denouncing
pro-Israel feminist Phyllis Chesler and recently demanded that leftist
media outfits, like Pacifica Radio and Feminist Magazine prevent Chesler
from expressing her views. Among Chesler's grievous sins that upset Korin
is the fact that Chesler publishes articles in Frontpage Magazine, and so
clearly does not deserve freedom of speech. The Los Angeles Jewish Journal
cites Korin as saying, ". "We know that the occupation is the source of
violence." Living on occupied Mexican and Indian land in California, Korin
insists the Jews had no right to migrate to Israel because there were
"indigenous people" already there: "Indigenous" Arabs, most of whom
themselves migrated to the same region after 1880 when the Jews started
bringing capital into "Palestine". In reality, the war of aggression by
the Arab states against Israel in 1967 and the continuing anti-Jewish
violence by the Arabs, encouraged by Korin, are the source of the Israeli
presence in the West Bank and Gaza and not the other way around.
Lisa Hajjar has made an entire academic career out of bashing the United
States and Israel for their supposed use of torture against Arabs. She
spouts off these baseless accusations from her academic home at the
University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB), where she teaches in its
Law and Society program. In fact she has no credentials at all in law.
(She also teaches Middle East Studies. at UCSB, with even fewer
qualifications in that field.) Instead she holds a PhD in sociology from
American University. The one in Washington, not Cairo. Hajjar is among the
shrillest voices in the United States trying to chant the accusations over
American .abuses of the human rights. of the al-Qaeda terrorists in
Guantanamo Bay. She served on the pretentious world tribunal, the one
that found Saddam's Iraq innocent and the US guilty of war crimes and
human rights abuses. Among the .tribunal's. objective findings were that
the occupation of Palestine, Afghanistan and all other colonized areas is
illegal and should be brought to an end immediately. Lisa Hajjar has
written: There is no reason to doubt that torture has been systemic and
pervasive, or that authorization can be traced up the chain of command, or
that this has seriously damaged not only the immediate victims but also
our national institutions and America's image abroad. Yet top officials
in the Bush Administration are still doing what torturing regimes do:
denying the facts and blaming "rogue" officers. Despite the abundant
evidence of torture, Congress refuses to challenge these denial tactics in
any meaningful way, for example by refusing to confirm for high office
those responsible. What we desperately need is public acknowledgment that
torture is always and everywhere a crime, and an official policy that
reflects this conviction. Hajjar has tried to define herself academically
as a scholar having some expertise on the use of torture. She defines her
aim as the debunking the false .popular belief that Western history
constitutes a progressive move from more to less torture.. The fact that
she publishes her .findings. on web sites of the communist party raises
questions about her credibility and objectivity. Hajjar gets her kicks out
of issuing .warnings. about human rights abuses. She has spent her
energies bemoaning the .torture. of the Iraqi Ba' athists being held in
the Abu Ghraib prison.
Lisa Hajjar is apparently the daughter of a Finnish mother and a father of
Syrian descent. She teaches in the Law and Society Program. at the
University of California at Santa Barbara, but she is in fact nothing more
than a
third-rate leftist sociologist. She has no training in law or legal
studies, is not qualified as a Middle East scholar or researcher, and his
extraordinarily few bona fide publications even in sociology. None of this
prevented UCSB from granting her tenure as well as its .Pious Award. for
her research. She was among the UCSB faculty members opposing the war
against Iraq and defending Saddam as part of Not in Our Name. Among the
scholarly articles. Hajjar lists on her vita are many propaganda screeds
that she published, including those in the anti-Israel pro-terror Middle
East Report, for In these Times, on the MERIP organization's web page, in
the .Amnesty International. magazine, and a partisan defense of
Palestinian mass murderer Marwan Barghouti.[1] On her vita, besides the
partisan propaganda we could find at most six articles she has published
in refereed journals, hardly enough to get a faculty member tenure in any
serious academic department.
Hajjar is author of a recently-published pseudo-scholarly book, Courting
Conflict: The Israeli Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza, a
broadside assault against Israel's military courts, which often try
Palestinian terrorists. Israeli civilian courts do not have jurisdiction
in the West Bank and Gaza Strip for the simple reason that these areas are
not formally annexed to Israel, although Palestinian terrorists convicted
in military courts may appeal to Israel's Supreme Court. The book is less
an analysis of the military courts than it is a partisan denunciation of
Israel's presence in the occupied territories. and an open endorsement of
the rights of Palestinians to resist it, Hajjar's Newspeak term for mass
murdering Jews. (Israelis arresting murdering terrorists would not
qualify as .resistance by Jews. in the Hajjar book, of course.) True,
Israel itself has debated the circumstances under which .moderate physical
pressure. could be applied to captured terrorists to force them to reveal
information. But Israel is in a state of war and a fight for its very
life against Arab fascism. Indeed years ago even this .moderate pressure.
was prohibited by the Israeli court system. The main prisoner abuse of
jailed Palestinians in Israel these days seems to be that some of their
VCR's are really difficult to pre-program. In fact, while prohibited in
Israel, it is not clear at all why terrorists should NOT be tortured,[2]
this on purely ethical grounds. Be that as it may, while conceding that a
history of Israeli interrogation of Palestinians has never been written,
and the conditions do not exist for such an undertaking. Hajjar is willing
to take the word of the Bash-Israel lobby that Israel routinely uses
torture against Palestinian prisoners. Among the primary sources cited by
Hajjar to prove that Israel uses torture are screeds in Tikkun Magazine,
the Palestine Research Center. in Beirut, the late neonazi anti-Semite
Israel Shahak, and other far-leftist propagandists. Hajjar's book. has
been lavishly praised by pro-terror Islamic fundamentalist web sites, and
one of her screeds has been cited and praised by a neonazi web site.
Before coming to Santa Barbara, Hajjar taught military law at Swarthmore.
There she engaged in partisan one-sided indoctrination in her classroom,
as is revealed by the syllabi of her courses there. Her required reading
list was a who's who of far leftists, communists, and haters of American
and Israel. Among her proclamations at Swarthmore, was: .While the United
States voices outrage about Saddam Hussein, it goes on tolerating human
rights violations and other misdeeds by regional allies. Her research. at
Swarthmore consisted of little more than serving as a cheerleader for
politicized cause lawyers.
Hajjar has served as editorial assistant and writer at MERIP, a
fanatically anti-Israel pro-terror think tank. in Washington DC. She also
is a member of the board of editors (alongside such scholars as Columbia
University's Joseph Massad) of the pseudo-academic Journal of Palestine
Studies, a partisan propaganda journal that features such .scholars. as
the PLO chief. The Middle East Quarterly describes the Journal of
Palestine Studies as a PLO propaganda organ disguised as an academic
journal; for example, it routinely refers to the creation of Israel as an-Nakba
(catastrophe in Arabic). Orbis, Fall 1988, p. 637, describes the Institute
of Palestine Studies, publisher of the Journal of Palestine Studies, as
"an arm of the Palestine Liberation Organization." Stanford's Joel Beinin
publishes his anti-Israel propaganda pieces there, as do the usual Israeli
far-Left anti-Semites favoring the destruction of their own country. The
.journal. makes little attempt to hide its political agenda. Hajjar does
not hide her support for Palestinian violence. She writes: Because
Palestinians are stateless and dispersed, their struggle for national
rights has taken .unconventional. forms, including guerilla warfare. The
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which emerged in the 1960s to
lead this struggle, has been castigated by Israel, and to a lesser extent
the US, as nothing but a terrorist organization. This typifies the use of
the terrorist label to non-states in their struggles against states..
Since most Palestinians have identified politically with the PLO, it was
easy for the Israeli state to relate the repression of Palestinians to the
imperatives of Jewish/Israeli national security. Generally speaking,
everything connected to Palestinian nationalist activities and especially
to the PLO was considered a security threat which (sic) could justify
limitations and restrictions of rights.
Those unconventional. Palestinian forms of protest happen to include
blowing up buses full of school children and pregnant mothers. Hajjar is a
radical feminist, but one with little real interest in the position of
women in the Arab world and with no concern at all over Israeli women
being murdered by her beloved Palestinian terrorists. She has mentioned
that in Morocco things are less equitable than at Vassar. She seems to
believe that the main cause for Arab feminists should be destroying
Israel. She is highly praised by Neve Gordon, a fanatic anti-Israel
lecturer in political science at Ben Gurion University in Israel, someone
who was arrested for serving as a human shield. for Palestinian murderers,
and someone who wrote a sycophantic piece about Holocaust Denier Norman
Finkelstein, comparing Finkelstein ethically to the Prophets in the
Bible. Gordon and Hajjar like to cite one another as authoritative
sources for the claim that Israel uses torture against Arab prisoners.
This is a bit like Ward Churchill and Noam Chomsky citing one another's
works to prove how that America is more oppressive than Nazi Germany. At
least five of Hajjar.s articles are featured on a PLO web site. Together
with Steve Niva, a pro-terrorism far-leftist faculty member at Evergreen
State College in Washington State (from which Rachel Corrie was dispatched
to go commit suicide on behalf of Palestinian terrorism in Gaza) and a
Counterpunch columnist, she is a sycophantic groupie of Edward Said and
described his book as a seminal event, causing lasting reverberations
throughout the academy. "[3] Hajjar also writes for The Nation, where she
openly endorses nutty conspiracy theories. She writes inter alia: While
neoconservatism may help explain much about American military and foreign
policy after 9/11, it doesn't account for the legal reasoning that set the
conditions for the torture scandal. For that, we need to look to the
Federalist Society, an organization established by right-wing lawyers in
the early 1980s to redress liberal bias. in American law schools and the
legal profession. The thinking and influence of Federalist Society types
who dominate legal positions (and judicial appointments) in the Bush
Administration are laid bare in the torture memos, which document the
triumph of international law-averse officials in the Justice Department,
the Pentagon and the White House over dissenting voices in the State
Department and sectors of the professional military.
She has tried to build much of her academic credentials upon her research
concerning the uses of torture. She insists torture is used widely by
both the US and Israel and her evidence for this is that some Arabs claim
this is so, as do some far-left propagandists such as Kenneth Roth from
.Human Rights Watch. In fact, HRW has been exposed by NGO-Monitor as
constituting little more than an anti-Israel smear lobby and is hardly a
credible source. Other sources for her claims concerning torture include
the extremist anti-Israel leftist organization in Israel, Betselem, which
denies that Israel has the right to defend itself against terrorism at all
- other than by surrendering to terrorist demands, and which has been
repeatedly caught lying. She teaches her views to hapless UCSB freshmen in
a formal course about .torture. Hajjar regularly attacks Alan Dershowitz
savagely for daring to suggest that under certain circumstances torturing
terrorists might be justified. She compares American and Israeli officials
to the nazis tried in Nuremberg. Lisa Hajjar may be at her most dishonest
when she is co-authoring political propaganda together with Stanford
University professor of history Joel Beinin. In Alyssa A. Lappen.s words,
Beinin .denounces American imperialism on Al-Jazeera Television. A former
Zionist, he refers to jihadist suicide bombers as martyrs. He praised
Mideast scholars for ignoring the issue of terrorism, and he regularly
repeats the most twisted and paranoid claims of Islamist regimes as though
they were historical fact. Beinin used to be the ayatollah of the
notoriously-biased Middle East Studies Association, an anti-American and
anti-Israel propaganda outfit disguised as an academic professional
association. (Hajjar has chaired sessions at MESA events.) Beinin
religiously churns out propaganda, with Hajjar is his regular sidekick.
Indeed, Beinin proudly lists these propaganda screeds on his personal web
page. Beinin and Hajjar were among the professors signing a statement
before the Allied invasion of Iraq, warning that Israel was planning to
conduct genocidal atrocities against Arabs the moment the US troops landed
in Mesopotamia. Well, Saddam was long ago toppled, with not even a
smidgen of an atrocity was performed by Israel, while not even a whisper
of an apology has come from either Beinin or Hajjar. Orwellistically, the
two continue to collaborate in conferences devoted to New History, which
is to say pseudo-history. Hajjar is a co-author and collaborator with
Beinin in a number of projects, including "Palestine, Israel and the
Arab-Israeli Conflict: A Primer." It is widely reprinted, including on
anti-Israel pro-terror web sites such as. From Occupied Palestine,. and
also on those that are fronts for the PLO.
The Primer. is a rather typical example of getting just about everything
possible wrong. It begins with the proclamation that religion plays no
role in the Arab war against Israel and that it is all a "struggle over
land". Now
one of the few things unchallengeable about the Middle East conflict is
that it has virtually nothing to do with land. Arab countries already
control 6,145,389 square miles of land. That is almost twice the land
area of the United States, which is 3,537,438 square miles, and about the
same as the land area of Russia. Israel, even when including all of the
"occupied territories" retained from 1967, controls less than 10,000
square miles. The West Bank and the Gaza Strip comprise about 2300 square
miles (a bit less when deducting Jerusalem and its suburbs from the
account), which is about half the size of the Everglades. Beinin and
Hajjar want us to believe that with 6,145,389 square miles, the Arabs want
war and genocide, but with 6,145,389 plus 2300 more, then they will want
peace. If Israel only trades land for peace with the land-deprived Arabs,
and never mind that its abandonment of the West Bank would leave an Israel
ten miles wide and waiting for the Arab armies to annihilate, then all
will be well.
Hajjar and Beinin want the world to believe that the entire Middle East
war is due to the fact that those evil selfish Jews are unwilling to share
their 10,000 square miles with the poor land-starved Arabs. But, in
reality, the obvious true cause of the Middle East war is the fact that
the Arab world is unwilling to allow the Jews to control even a sixth of
one percent of the territory of the Middle East. The Arabs, controlling
more land than any other ethnic group on the planet besides the Russians
(most of whose land is frozen tundra), are simply unwilling to share even
the tiniest sliver of the Middle East with the Jews. In the Primer Beinin
and Hajjar get most of the rest of their political history wrong as well.
They claim that religious Zionism developed after the Six-Day War, whereas
it developed in the nineteenth century. They claim that the Six Day War
triggered messianic religiosity among Israelis, whereas the evidence
suggests Israelis became more secularist after 1967 than they were before.
Beinin and Hajjar also reveal their biases by what they do NOT report,
such as the mass immigration into "Palestine" of Arabs from neighboring
countries starting in the late nineteenth century, and their counting of
all Moslems, including Turks, as "Palestinian Arabs." They write, "In
1920 and 1921, clashes broke out between Arabs and Jews in which roughly
equal numbers of both groups were killed." This makes it sound like Jews
and Arabs were equally involved in murder. In fact, the Jewish dead were
murdered by Arab pogromchiki whereas the Arab dead were rioters shot by
British troops. When Arabs started mass-murdering Jews in 1929, Beinin
and Hajjar blame the Jews, for raising a flag near the Wailing Wall. They
then write: "In 1921, the British divided this region in two: east of
the Jordan River became the Emirate of Transjordan, to be ruled by
Faysal's brother 'Abdullah,. and west of the Jordan River became the
Palestine Mandate. This was the first time in modern history that
Palestine became a unified political entity (emphasis added)." In fact,
of course, it was clearly a division of Palestine into an Arab two-thirds
and a remaining third earmarked for Jews. The Beinin-Hajjar version of the
creation of the "Palestinian" refugee problem is nothing more and nothing
less than the Arab version. Those horrid Jews expelled the poor innocent
Arab victims! In fact, the Arab refugees fled at the direction of their
commanders and to escape the battle zones created when the Arab fascist
states invaded Israel and tried to annex all the lands of
Western Palestine.[4] Beinin and Hajjar also repeat the now-discredited
myth about how Arab civilians in Deir Yassin were "massacred" by Jews.
Beinin and Hajjar then recite the lies about supposed discrimination by
Israel against Israeli Arabs: "But in many respects they were and remain
second-class citizens, since Israel defines itself as the state of the
Jewish people and Palestinians are non-Jews." France is a French state,
Greece is a Greek state, England is an English state. Being in the
minority is synonymous with being a second-class citizen in the "minds" of
Beinin and Hajjar, but only in Israel. (If anything, Israel discriminates
in FAVOR of its Arab citizens and against Jews!!) Not a word in their
screed on the status of ethnic and religious minorities in the rest of the
Middle East. They go on: "About 40 percent of their (Arab) lands were
confiscated by the state and used for development projects that benefited
Jews primarily or exclusively." I guess the Left-Coast Duo assume that
Arabs do not use the roads, universities, hospitals and parks in Israel on
public lands. The Beinin-Hajjar account of supposed abuses of Arabs by
Israel is as undocumented and baseless as it is unscholarly. They write,
"Torture of Palestinian prisoners has been a common practice since at
least 1971, and dozens of people have died in detention from abuse or
neglect." Their evidence is that they think so. This is all complete
falsehood and propaganda dressed up as "research". They add, "According
to Israel, Palestinian terrorism includes all forms of opposition to the
occupation (including non-violence)." According to Israel? According to
Beinin and Hajjar, all forms of Arab atrocities against Jews are "protests
against occupation., whereas no form of anti-terror operations by Israel
could possibly be considered justifiable self-defense.
The Beinin-Hajjar take on the "Oslo Accords" is that "the PLO accepted
this deeply flawed agreement with Israel because it was weak and had
little diplomatic support in the Arab world." They have got to be kidding!
Beinin and Hajjar do not think the Oslo Accords were deeply flawed because
they produced 1700 Israelis murdered by the PLO after it foreswore all use
of violence forever, but rather because they failed to deliver Israel's
annihilation. We now of course know that the PLO "accepted" the Oslo deal
only in order to get control of the West Bank and Gaza and use them as
terrorist bases to attack Israel. The PLO had no intention of abandoning
terror and murder, nor its ambitions to seek Israel.s annihilation. No
mention at all from Beinin and Hajjar about how the PLO violated each and
every clause in the Oslo Accord almost from the instant it was signed.
Beinin and Hajjar are at their most disengenuous and "revisionist", which
is to say dishonest, when they tell the saga of the failed "Camp David II.
conference: "Although Barak offered a far more extensive Israeli
withdrawal from the West Bank than any other Israeli leader had publicly
considered, he insisted on maintaining Israeli sovereignty over East
Jerusalem. This was unacceptable to the Palestinians and to most of the
Muslim world." Actually, Barak there offered Arafat not only East
Jerusalem but control of the Old City of Jerusalem as well, including its
Jewish shrines. Arafat turned Barak down because the deal did not provide
for the immediate annihilation of Israel (also known as the .right of
return.), which is really the PLO's minimal demand Then there are the
innuendoes and falsehoods by the Left-Coast Duo when it comes to recent
years in the Middle East. They write: "The Israeli military response
escalated dramatically after two soldiers, allegedly 'lost' in the
PA-controlled West Bank town of Ramallah, were killed October 12 by a
Palestinian mob returning from the funeral of an unarmed young man whom
soldiers had shot dead the day before." Note how the use of the quote
marks around the word "lost" and the absence of quotes around the word
unarmed convey to the reader the totally-false impression that the two
were involved in something nefarious. In fact, the two Jewish victims
were innocents, who were tortured and murdered in cold blood, and then
their bodies were mutilated. Ultimately Hajjar lets her pseudo-scholarship
and imagination fabricate the contents of her research. She claims her
own phone was tapped after the 9-11 attacks. Hajjar is convinced that
torturing Arabs is ingrained in the American soul. She is as fond of
whining about make-pretend right-wing conspiracies. as is Hillary
Clinton. Just before the toppling of Saddam, Hajjar endorsed warnings
that senior (US) officials could face prosecutions for war crimes, crimes
against humanity, and genocide if the war unfolds as reportedly planned,.
and claimed Bush was planning to nuke Iraq. This sociologist with no
legal training at all insists she has the right to pass legal judgment
upon the United States: the Bush administration has articulated positions
and pursued policies that blatantly contravene the Geneva Conventions. We
have no doubt that her Stanford sidekick Joel Beinin agrees. Notes:[1] The
Making of a Political Trial: The Marwan Barghouti Case. Middle East
Report, no. 225 (Winter 2002). [2] Alan Dershowitz, "Is It Necessary to
Apply `Physical Pressure' to Terrorists--and to Lie about It?" Israel Law
Review 23/2-3 (1989). [3] Lisa Hajjar and Steve Niva, "(Re)Made in the
USA: Middle East Studies in the Global Era," Middle East Report 7, no. 4
(October. December 1997), pp. 4.5. [4] Efraim Karsh .Were the
Palestinians Expelled? Commentary Magazine, July-August 2000 and Efraim
Karsh.The Palestinians and the .Right of Return, Commentary Magazine, May
2001.
The British Left Rallies to Support the Goals of the London Bombers
The Grand Global Conspiracy behind
the latest Oliver Stone Arrest
Well, the media are reporting the latest Oliver Stone was arrested for
drug and alcohol charges in Beverly Hills over the weekend. They
found illegal drugs in Ollie’s car and arrested him for DUI.
Oliver Stone had earlier been arrested in 1999 on alcohol and drug
charges and, as part of a plea bargain, and at that time agreed to enter
a rehabilitation program. He had been arrested for drugs before,
the first time being when he was only 21.
Now we know what you are all thinking, and that is that the media accounts of this could not possibly be the correct descriptions of events and there must be some grand and awful story-behind-the-story that explains the arrest. After all, Oliver Stoned is best known for his cinematic portrayal of conspiracy plots in his movies and his far-left politics, including open endorsements of communism and a sycophant “documentary” celebrating Fidel Castro, so one-sided that HBO refused to air it. Stone’s views about Cuba and Castro may be summed up in this one citation: “Street demonstrations in favor of Fidel Castro are not a fake. If they were, those demonstrators should win an Oscar for best acting. I can testify to this because I have seen the joy on their faces when people come up to the president." Elsewhere he added, “In Cuba, I observed an openness and freedom that I had not found in any other country in the region, the Caribbean or Central America."
Stone’s pronouncements include issuing a statement after 9-11 blaming
the American media companies for the terrorist attacks. At an HBO
Films panel on "Making Movies That Matter," Oliver Stoned states that
huge corporations that make mediocre movies are part of what made Osama
bin Laden plan the Sept. 11 attack. "They control culture," he said of
the corporations, in comments quoted in the New Yorker. "They control
ideas. And I think the revolt of Sept. 11th was about 'F-- you! F-- your
order.' "Stone also said, "This attack was pure chaos, and chaos is
energy." ("The Stars Weigh In," San Francisco Chronicle, October
16, 2001.) Soon after that, Stone spoke at Brown University. According
to the Brown Alumni Magazine (January/February 2002). Stone derided the
entire enterprise as well as the movie industry and the history
profession. “Don’t believe most of the stuff you see in the
movies,” the Oliver told a Brown audience on December1. Hollywood,
said the director of Platoon and JFK, is controlled by “chickens” and
“concentration camp guards.” History books are no better, Stone
warned. “Most historians are ass-kissers and tenure seekers,” he said.
What to believe then? “Believe my stuff,” Stone said. Every
single scene in his film about the JFK assassination has been shown to
be a fabrication. Drawing comparisons to Vietnam, Stone accused the U.S.
government of withholding the truth about the war in Afghanistan: “Bin
Laden was completely protected by the oil companies in this country who
told [President] Bush not to go after him because it would piss off the
Saudis.” Then, Stone claimed, there’s the cover-up involving ground
zero: limbs getting cut off bodies for jewelry, a man walking off with
$132 million. Stone's paranoia and his contempt for historic facts are
most visible in the movie "JFK" which turns the historical record on its
head. This did not stop a CAL-Berkeley moonbat from presenting
Stone to his students as a “historian.” Stone claims to be half-French,
keeps saying he will flee America for France because of Republicans, and
got him some cushy subsidies from the French government, something that
prompted one wag to suggest he change his name to "Oliver Caillou." (Caillou
is the French word for stone). One can tell he has a
strong French streak in his character because he insists he lost his
virginity to a prostitute, because he didn't get the opportunity to meet
girls at his single-sex school. At least one web site is
devoted to boycotting anything connected with the Oliver. Here is a
typical Stone take on reality: "The right wing is the same everywhere,
in Cuba or Viet Nam. It is like an octopus, snatching everything with
its tentacles. They control the Internet, radio and TV stations, and
newspapers. But above all, they are perfectly organized. Right wingers
master the art of negative publicity and are capable of destroying the
image of anyone they consider to be their enemy. They annihilate
anything opposed to their interests, utilizing mass emailing, articles,
and reports. In the United States, censorship is the order of the day.
It is really sad to think that Florida may end up deciding the November
elections once again, and that the extreme-right wing, including
anti-Castro groups, may manipulate the results for a second time. These
people are blinded by patriotic fanaticism and are ready to invade any
country, and shoot down planes if necessary. They thought that my first
movie about Castro, 'Comandante,' was hideous, and they killed it almost
before it was even born. They were merely afraid of it." Now as I was
saying above, there has GOT to be more to the latest Stone arrest than
some drunk driving and pharmaceuticals. It must have himself been
the victim of a colossal frameup! So here is our take on what REALLY
happened. We suspect that some rogue CIA and FBI agents were outraged by
Stone’s exposure of CIA plotting in his films and especially of the
conspiracy behind the JFK assassination. SO they got together with
some wealthy Christian fundamentalists and Jewish neoconservatives in
control of the Pentagon and they set to work. First thing they do is get
the oil companies protecting Osama bin Laden to pony up some cash and
then they take this to the Beverly Hills police headquarters while
Commissioner Axel Foley hooks them up with some local UCLA chemistry
professors. These professors design a special chemical spray to
make the innocent Stone appear to be drunk while he is driving and this
is inserted through special vents in the undercarriage of Stone’s
Mercedes using a device first designed by the Watergate burglars to make
McGovern appear dazed. Then the Beverly Hills cops plant drugs in
the Stone vehicle, which actually were originally part of a shipment the
CIA was planning to sell in East LA to gang bangers in order to raise
money for the contras and with which to bribe neoconservative magazine
columnists. The device was actually inserted into the car when Stone’s
attention was being distracted by an agent dressed as a Los Angeles
street walker speaking French and some West Hollywood dudes with
tee-shirts that read “Yum, Alexander was Great!”
How to Solve the
Counterpunch Problem via the "One Magazine Solution"!!
We have this amazing idea for how to deal with the Far-Left web magazine
Counterpunch. It is called the "One-Magazine Solution". The idea is that
Counterpunch and Frontpage Magazine merge and then continue to operate
as a single web magazine under the hegemonic control of David Horowitz
and the Frontpage people, while the Counterpunch writers and editors
would be assured minority rights, except for those Counterpunchers born
outside the US, like Alexander Cockburn, who would be expelled back to
the countries whence they came. Now before you accuse me of ingesting
the same substances as the editors of Tikkun Magazine, let me explain.
The Neofascist Left, and by that I mean the extremist Left best
represented by Counterpunch and "The Nation" (or - as I prefer to call
it - The MoonbatNation) have in recent years been demonstrating a
refreshing candor and openess when it comes to their anti-Semitism.
Unlike so many others, they do not pretend that they simply oppose
Zionism but-got-nothing-against-dem-Joos-as-such-mind you. Specifically,
they are entirely open about the fact that they want to see Israel
destroyed. They call it the "One State Solution," also known as the
Rwanda Solution, in which Israel will be enfolded into an Arab
Palestinian Islamofascist Third World Kleptocratic State, encompassing
all Israeli territory, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. The Jews would
be assured minority status in this Arab-majority entity, and so would be
treated almost as well as the Copts in Egypt or the Kurds in Iraq or the
southern Sudanese are today. Now, how come Israel is the only country on
the planet that these Mega-Moonbats demand be destroyed, you ask? It is
very simple. Israel is the only Jewish country and the Neofascist Left
hates Jews. Sometimes the Lefties pretend they want Israel destroyed
because they claim it is a "discriminatory" or "immoral" country, but no
one thinks they really
believe that. Israel is by far the least discriminatory and immoral
country in the Middle East and the state of human rights in Israel is at
least a thousand times better than in the next-best state in the Middle
East. In recent years, Counterpunch has run quite a few articles
opposing the "Two State Solution" and endorsing the "One State
Solution". The "Two-State Solution" to the Middle East conflict should
in fact be more correctly termed the "Twenty Four State Solution." As
envisioned in the "Road Map", under this the Arabs would add to their
twenty two existing states, holding land almost twice the area of the
United States, yet another state, a twenty-third Arab state to be called
Palestine, the second Arab state to be erected in the territory of
historic Palestine (the other one being named Jordan), and the Jews
would keep their one tiny statelet with land smaller than New Jersey.
That is the Bush plan. But the Neofascist Left insists that this "Road
Map" solution is too generous to the Jews and too stingy to the Arabs.
Their preferred solution
is to turn the Levant into Rwanda and resolve the ethnic conflict the
same
way the Rwandans did.
The last in the series of "Destroy Israel" columns in Counterpunch is
run
there this week, A Two-State Solution is No Solution, by Islamic Fascist
Mazin Qumsiyeh. [The number of neonazis and Islamofascists has been
growing in the Counterpunch Cockburn stables. ] The "one-state
solution",
based upon sustaining all states on earth no matter how evil but destroying Israel, was proposed in Counterpunch pages in recent times by
mega-terrorist (now in prison awaiting conviction) Sami Al-Arian, Ray
Hanania, Will Youmans, Michael Neumann, Simon Jones (a Counterpunch
regular who insists that Jews must liberate themselves by helping to
destroy Israel and create a Second Holocaust of Jews, and a collaborator
with Swedish nazi Israel Shamir), Omar Barghouti (who just was reduced
to
tears by the British Association of University Teachers rejecting his
academic pogrom against Israel), and so many others we got tired.
Counting
passing moonbats makes us sleepy. [A bit ironically, the Leftist Lord
Haw-Haw of Israel, Uri Avnery, OPPOSED the "one-state solution" on
Counterpunch pages. ]
"The Nation", always trying to out-jihad Counterpunch and bypass it in
the
Anti-Semitism Tournament of the Left, has also long endorsed the Rwanda
Solution, er - we mean - the "One-State Solution" in which Israel would
be
destroyed, and of course that would have nothing at all to do with the
fact that Israel is the only country the Jews have on earth. The Germans
called it the Final Solution. None of this of course has stopped the
Columbia School of Journalism, located in that Columbia Madrassah on the
Upper West Side, from turning the school's web site over to the control
of
"The Nation's" Uber-Moonbat editor and publisher, the Jew-hating,
Castro-loving Victor Navasky in recent days.
DON'T CALL IT RACISM
In 1977 Israel's criminal code was changed. Section 144A made "racism" a crime. Racism was defined as "persecution, humiliation, demeaning, displaying animosity, hostility, violence or strife toward a population group or parts of such a group, all on the basis of skin color or membership in a racial or ethnic-national grouping." At first glance, this law seems innocuous enough. After all, who can be in favor of racism or against attempts to eliminate it? But the main problems in this law quickly become clear. First, the law criminalizes some expressions of speech, and so infringes free speech. Second, the definition of "racism" in the law is so vague as to render the entire law arbitrary and useless. Third, in its implementation and enforcement the law has already been used in an arbitrary and anti-democratic manner for partisan purposes. The law has become a bludgeon to suppress free speech selectively, used against some right-wing Israeli Jews. At the same time there has never been any attempt to prosecute Arabs nor left-wing Jewish extremists under the same law. The immediate motivation for the framers of Israel's law was the activities of followers of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane. The law's purpose was to suppress the freedom of speech of these Kahanists and of some other fringe groups among Israeli Jews. But prosecuting Kahanists for "racism" is inconsistent and arbitrary. Most of the problems with the anti-racism law became clear soon after it was passed by the Knesset. One of the first cases prosecuted under the law was the State of Israel v. Rabbi Ido Elba (Docket 2831/95). Elba had published an article arguing that in the Torah there are separate rabbinic laws applying to killing Jews, covered in the part of the Ten Commandments prohibiting "murder," and the killing of Canaanite non-Jews living among Jews, which was prohibited under a separate law given to all humans descending from Noah. The article was a scholarly exercise in explaining rabbinic laws and especially the commentary on manslaughter by Maimonides. But the publication came out shortly after the massacre of Arabs in Hebron by Baruch Goldstein, and the public and some politicians were looking for a target to prosecute for anti-Arab racism. In April 1995, Elba was convicted under the anti-racism law and sentenced to four years' imprisonment (two of them being a suspended sentence). The Supreme Court upheld the conviction and the sentence the following year. The vagueness of the anti-racism law is extremely problematic. The law's language was so poorly formulated and thought through that it would make statements like "I do not want to date non-Jews," or "I do not like blond women" crimes. Should reading certain passages in the Bible be prohibited because they offend some modern ears? The law explicitly makes advocating discrimination against a demographic group to be racism. But Israel is full of groups advocating discrimination against Jews as part of affirmative action preferences, and, of course, also discrimination against males. Not a single person has ever been prosecuted in Israel for this. Why not? Racism is, after all, a belief or a feeling, albeit an evil one, but a private one. Do we really want a Racism Patrol inspecting bars and poker games, hunting down individuals making racist statements in chat rooms or in salons? The anti-racism law is not merely an assault against free speech, but arguably the most ludicrous law Israel has on its books. A Kahanist was indicted and convicted of racism for selling T-shirts printed with the words "Where there are no Arabs there is no terrorism." Another is under investigation for selling an anti-disengagement-plan board game. In contrast, no racism by Arabs has been prosecuted. Nor has bigotry by politicians such as Shinui's Tommy Lapid, whose entire party agenda is based on anti-haredi bigotry. When communist Sami Michael, a prominent writer and a leader of the Association of Civil Rights in Israel, made comments which struck me as justifying Hamas's mass murders of Jews, he was not prosecuted as a racist. No Arab political parties . regardless of how outrageous their statements are . have been banned or prosecuted under the anti-racism law. Neither have Israeli professors, artists or intellectuals endorsing and justifying Arab terrorism against Jews, or declaring that Jews are not entitled to any form of self-determination.
Free speech is alive in Israel, but wounded and threatened as the internal political divisions in Israel deepen. Besides the prosecution of those utilizing free speech and saying things of which the political establishment disapproves, there are growing, open threats from the government to use the police, intelligence services and preventive detention without trial to bully opponents of government policy into silence. The very fact that assaults against free speech for "racists" are so popular in Israel, especially among the chattering classes, illustrates how shallow, conditional and dubious is the commitment by so many in Israel to democracy.
The University of Kentucky's
Prof in Drag
The web newsletter "Inside Higher Education" reports yet another tale
of neoconservative oppression of the rights of moonbat faculty
members. It seems that the the University of Kentucky and Georgetown
College are unhappy with sociology adjunct professor Jeremy D. Kerr,
who now teaches a course on "gender and society" at the University of
Kentucky. You see, Prof. Jeremy likes to teach his class in drag. You
can see him in his work clothes here. Kerr also teaches a required
sociology course that UKY students in sociology are coerced into
taking. Kerr requires his students to write essays on the benefits of
hemp. You will be happy to hear that the UKY President just renewed
his contract. Kerr has been told by his department chair at Kentucky
to stop cross-dressing in class, and Kerr has also sued Georgetown,
charging that he lost an adjunct position there because of his
cross-dressing in area restaurants. Kerr finished his Ph.D. at
Kentucky in the spring and has been working there as an adjunct. Kerr
has also taken his cross-dressing to area restaurants and reportedly
has been thrown out of some of them for appearing in women's clothing.
Kerr's lawsuit against Georgetown College says that these incidents
led the college not to renew his contract there, according to an
article in The Lexington Herald-Leader. I'm turning it around. What's
good for the girls is good for the guys,. he said. His lawsuit against
Georgetown charges it with sex discrimination for not renewing his
contract. I, for one, would sure like to hear his rendition of "I'm
just a Coal Miner's Daughter.
Massachusetts Rainbats
The so-called Massachusetts "Green-Rainbow" Party is a group of mega-moonbats
in the state that gave us Teddy Kennedy and Mikey Dukakis. It holds
conventions, possibly on a Boston Common park bench that can hold all of
its members. It is run by a Moonbat named Mel King, who teaches "urban
studies" as an adjunct at MIT and whose main academic contribution to
humankind was a ranting piece called "The Power of Love in Research
Planning and Education". This year its "convention" decided to pick up
where the British Association of University Teachers failed. As you
recall, some anti-Israel jihadniks first managed to slip through a
"resolution to boycott Israel at the AUT convention while the sane
members were off having a Guinness, but when they returned they
overturned it. The "Green Rainbow" Rainbats just passed a resolution
denouncing Israel as an "apartheid state," evidently because it is the
only country in the Middle East that is NOT an apartheid state, and call
for sanctions against Israel and support for Palestinian terrorism. They
also denounce "US Imperialism in Sudan" (really! I am not inventing
this!), and demand an end to the "occupation" of Iraq. The convention
was held in occupied Massachusetts. We figure both of the members of the
Rainbow Green Party endorsed the resolution.
The Genocidal Phantoms of the Oprah
You know things are really getting out of hand
when TV hostess Oprah Winfrey decides to go jihad. Yes, Oprah, the
waddling guru of the bored middle-class at-home housewives, has
repeatedly taken time off from teaching her followers about closet
organization and thigh reduction, in order to promote the Palestinian
cause. She has run one-sided articles about the Middle East conflict on
her show and and in her O Magazine. Whenever the subject of terrorism is
broached on her show, Oprah studiously avoids allowing anyone to link it
to Palestinians or the Hizbollah. She interviewed mothers of suicide
bombers who were distraught because their ho uses were bulldozed. There
was no mention of Israeli babies and their mothers being blown up in
buses, pizza parlours blown to smithereens, nor Jewish teens murdered
while at the disco in Tel Aviv. Not even the Jews murdered when two
guests of the International Solidarity Movement blew up Mike's Place in
Tel Aviv. Debbie Schlussel has dubbed her the affable Joseph Goebbels of
daytime talk TV. Columnist Naomi Ragen demolished Oprah for her
politicized bias. T
he Anti-Defamation League has denounced her for bias, noting that
'Palestinian girls will be rescued when their leaders say "No" to the
incitement, hate and violence that has permeated their political and
cultural landscape for years now.'
In the June issue, a feature article tries to arouse sympathy for a an
18-year-old Palestinian terrorist, Yusra Abdu, who was tried, convicted
and is currently serving time in an Israeli jail for conspiring to
perform a suicide bombing. The article tries to make the Palestinian
wannabe mass-murderer appear humane and likeable. The propaganda article
is written by one David France. He quotes enemies of Israel, leftists,
and unidentified human rights activists, spouting false statistics. In
the piece he asks, 'What would make a girl take such a radical and
grisly step?' France "answers" himself when he quotes a moonbatish
university professor, who asserts that: "religion is not the cause [of
Palestinian suicide terror]... these are people who define their
situation as hopeless. They feel that they have no way to respond
against what they see as Israeli military aggression." The real reason
the Oprah heroine set out to commit mass murder was that she was worried
about getting punished for participating in a date! Because a date would
have compromised Yusra honor and she might have found herself getting
her throat slit by her brother or father. Is it any wonder that, as
France himself writes, she confessed to Israeli security police that the
real reason she wanted to blow herself up was "boredom?" Now in fact,
the reason 18 year old Palestinians try to commit mass murder is because
they are driven by a genocidal neonazi Islamofascist ideology instilled
in them over decades by the PLO and its affiliates, all with the
blessing and cheerleading of the Western Left. Hard as it is for an
Oprah fan to understand, Palestinians want to mass murder Jews
because they hate Jews and want to annihilate Jews. Not because they are
"occupied." (They were mass murdering Jews long before any land was
"occupied" by Israel in 1967.) And no one with atlas can seriously
suggest that Arabs murder Jews because Jews have too much land and Arabs
not enough. Why would Oprah, who is not exactly hard up for cash, sell
out and allow her magazine to be hijacked on behalf of Palestinian
violence?
Maybe Doctor Phil can tell us?
Brooklyn's 'Social Marxist' Moonbat
Those of you convinced that there is just not enough
communism on campus will be encouraged when you hear that Dr. Timothy
Shortell was recently elected by his colleagues to chair Brooklyn
College’s Department of Sociology . Shortell defines himsel as a "social
marxist," whatever that is. My guess is it is someone claiming to
believe Marx was correct about things as a social ruse to get into the
dorm rooms of the radical chicks.
Professor Shortell refers to religious people as “an ugly, violent lot,”
“moral retards,” and compares faith to “a child-like rationality.” These
statements were written by the good professor and appeared on a website
called Anti-Naturals.org, which has its "world headquarters" at PO Box
9401, Amherst MA, 01059-9401. Shortell refers to President Bush as
“Criminal-In-Chief” on his website. One post says, “Someone really ought
to do a comparative study of this administration and the propaganda
techniques of Nazi Germany. Karl Rove owes a lot to Joseph Goebbels.”
On his personal web page he insists, "I remain convinced that humanity
would be better off without religion.” He tells his hapless sociology
students: "Everyone who appreciates the good, the true and the beautiful
has a duty to challenge this social poison at every opportunity. It is
not enough to be irreligious; we must use our critique to expose
religion for what it is: sanctimonious nonsense.”
Maybe someone should let him know that Marxism is one of the most
primitive forms of theology around, and one that has been thoroughly
debunked by science.
The New Middle East version of
the RCA Puppy and Gramophone Ridiculous "rumors"...
The New Middle East version of the RCA Puppy and Gramophone Ridiculous
"rumors" believed in the Middle East about supposed mishandling of the
Koran are not restricted to the usual Islamofascists accusing the
"Crusaders" and the "Zionists" of plotting against the Arab fascist
regimes. (Come to think of it, the world would be a lot better off these
days with a lot more Crusaders and Zionists in the Middle East!) Now
Israeli Arabs are all suddenly excited over a story that is circulating
in the Arab press and television about a girl who was turned into a dog
by Allah for mishandling a Koran. Really.
A Muslim girl from Taibeh was punished by Allah and turned into a dog,
according to rumors that have been circulating in the Arab-Israeli town
this week, Arab-language newspaper Panorama reported. According to the
rumors, the harsh punishment was meted out after the girl, upset by her
mother’s request to bring her the Quran as she was watching television,
threw the holy Muslim book at the mother with disdain. Women in Taibeh
claimed they saw the story featured on Palestinian television. Now -
doesn't the very fact that no US troops in Gitma were turned into
puppies prove that the Newsweek story was hogwash? Even though the
Moonbat Left still insists the original Newsweek story, now retracted,
was correct? Keep your eyes open for the first report of this exciting
dog of a story on Counterpunch and "The Nation"!
Indecent Acts
An unmarried Indian couple have been sentenced to one
year in prison for hugging and kissing in a taxi in the Emirate of
Fujairah in the north of the UAE. A report in the local press identified
the man as Anis Balnabar and the woman as Bani Bent. After hopping in a
taxi, the driver spied through the rear mirror that the couple were
hugging and kissing each other. He turned the car and drove straight to
the nearest police station. The report said the couple were not even
aware that the vehicle had a taken a detour until it stopped before the
police station. The driver informed police that the two were engaged in
“indecent acts” in his car. Now, if they had instead been planting bombs
on Israeli school buses they would have been awarded a medal of valor
instead of being arrested.
Meanwhile, PLO Fatah gunmen admitted over the weekend that nine
Palestinians who were murdered in Bethlehem on suspicion of
collaboration with Israel were actually innocent victims of lawlessness.
Most of the "collaborators" in Bethlehem were kidnapped and executed in
public squares by Fatah gunmen, some whom have been given sanctuary in
European countries after hiding in the Church of Nativity during the IDF
incursion of 2002. The detainees were made to stand against walls, where
they were shot before cheering crowds. A leaflet distributed by
the Aksa Martyrs Brigades in the city has now referred to the victims as
"victims of lawlessness," which might mean they had also engaged in
illicit dating. These and many other stories are on the
clarityandresolve.com blog, which we suggest adding to your list of
favorites.
The Swastika on Alexander Cockburn's Armband
The myrmidons over at Counterpunch, led by Alexander Cockburn, have a new cause and a new Enemy of the Week. The target of leftist wrath this week is professor of history at Brown University Omer Bartov. His crime? Bartov dared to criticize anti-Semite Norman Finkelstein. Cockburn runs a column crayoned by one David Green, who savagely attacks Bartov for denouncing the pseudo-scholar and crackpot Finkelstein. Let us back up a little and explain. Norman Finkelstein is the darling of every neonazi Holocaust Denial web site on earth. He is a pseudo-historian who is a follower of Holocaust Denier David Irving, and regards Irving as a great and authoritative scholar. Nominally Jewish, he is every stormtrooper's dream, cheered by them as the "Jew who proves there was never any Holocaust of Jews by Nazi Germany." Finkelstein kept getting fired from his adjunct teaching jobs in New York, and when he realized he could not get any job at a real university, he took a gig at Depaul "University" in Chicago as an Assistant Professor. By comparison with Depaul, Ward Churchill's University of Colorado maintains the highest academic standards of hiring! Anyway, there Finkelstein continues to produce his anti-Semitic diatribe, which routinely get gobbled up by the world's neoniazis. Finkelstein constantly denounces all Holocaust survivors as frauds, thieves and liars, refers to the six million Jews murdered by Hitler as the "Six Million" in quotation marks, and mass produces anti-Israel pro-terror propaganda from his perch at Depaul. He has endlessly libeled Nobel Prize laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel for many years. A couple of years ago he tried to engage Alan Dershowitz in a battle of wits, except Finkelstein was only half equipped. Dershowitz made wiener shnitzel out of him. Finkelstein has been denounced as a neonazi, anti-Semite, or Holocaust Denier by virtually every Jewish group from any political corner anywhere on the planet. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen and all other serious historians have dismissed Finkelstein as a crackpot anti-Semite and fraud. Bartov's sin, in the "minds" of the Counterpunch team, is that he also considers Finkelstein a fraud and a neonazi. Bartov in the NY Times compared Finkelstein's scurrilous "book" about the "Holocaust Industry" to the Czarist anti-Semitic forgery "Protocols of the Elders of Zion". Cockburn's magazine has not yet reprinted the Protocols, although it has produced an equally anti-Semitic book by Cockburn himself that is just as full of ravings. and it openly endorse Finkelstein's ravings about a "Holocaust Industry." Bartov has given a series of lectures and published several articles debunking the lunatic ravings of Finkelstein. And that seems to be what has upset Herr Cockburn, who runs Green's pitdog attack against Bartov in this weekend's Counterpunch. Green and Finkelstein belong on the same plane that carried deported nazi Ernst Zundel back to their Fuhrer's fatherland. What really arouses the Counterpunch ire is this quote from Bartov: "For one of the most frightening aspects of Hitler's book is not that he said what he said at the time, but that much of what he said can be found today in innumerable places: on Internet sites, propaganda brochures, political speeches, protest placards, academic publications, religious sermons, you name it. As long as it does not have Hitler's name attached to it, this deranged discourse will be ignored or allowed to pass. The voices that express these opinions do not belong to a single political or ideological current, and they are much less easy to distinguish than in the 1930s. They belong to the right and the left, to the religious and the secular, to the West and the East, to the rabble and the leaders, to terrorists and intellectuals, students and peasants, pacifists and militants, expansionists and anti-globalization activists. The diplomacy advocated by Hitler is no longer relevant, but his reason for it, his 'worldview,' is alive and kicking, and it may still kick us." I have always suspected that Alexander Cockburn wakes up each morning, gives himself a Heil with raised arm in the mirror, goosesteps to the breakfast room, and then asks himself which act of outright anti-Semitism he can perform today to outdo even yesterday's.
A Neonazi Moonbat Embarrasses the Rest of the Left
You know that the
Bash-Israel web site calling itself "Deir Yassin Remembered" is off the
charts when a large group of OTHER Far-Leftist Bash-Israel anti-Zionists
are denouncing its director as an open neonazi and anti-Semite!
Paul Eisen is London-based co-director of Deir Yassin Remembered, a web
site purporting to seek to commemorate the "massacre" of Arabs by Jews
in 1948 at the village of Deir Yassin outside Jerusalem. The only
problem is that no massacre at all took place there, and the claim
that one did is little more than a medieval-style anti-Jewish blood
libel. A battle did in fact take place there, since the village
controlled access to then-besieged and starving Jerusalem, a battle in
which some Arabs and Jews died. The Far Left and the Neonazi Right have
long tried to turn the non-massacre of Deir Yassin into a bludgeon to
demonize Israel and Jews. Among the people on the board of "Deir
Yassin Remembered" are a Swedish Neonazi calling himself "Israel Shamir",
convicted traitor and spy Mordecai Vanunu, Saudi-financed ex-Congressman
Paul Findlay, PLO spokeswoman Hanan Ashrawi, and similar jihadniks of
their ilk. The site is a thinly-disguised front for the PLO. DePaul's
Holocaust-Denier Norman Finkelstein has evidently just been dropped from
the board of the site, being too much of an embarrassment even for them.
Paul Eisen has aroused the fury of the rest of the Bash-Israel
Jew-baiters by abandoning the common pretense of being "anti-Israel but
not anti-Jewish", a posture so beloved by most of the rest of the Left.
He has been publishing openly anti-Semitic materials, claiming that Jews
are plotting to take over the world, and openly supporting Palestinian
atrocities against Jews. When other anti-Israel Leftists were horrified
by this, they tried to get the web sites publishing Eisen to print their
own rebuttal of Eisen but they were refused. Eisen's "analysis"
has also been published by the "Zundelsite", the web site of Ernst
Zundel who was recently deported by Canada to Germany due to his open
nazi activities in North America. Eisen openly praises Zundel and the
adoration is mutual. Eisen openly collaborates with Swedish neonazi
Shamir, himself a close ally of Zundel. Eisen also writes anti-Jewish
pieces for the anti-Semitic Egyptian daily al-Ahram. Anyway, Eisen is
such an embarrassment for those anti-Israel leftists, who prefer to
perpetuate the myth of there being an anti-Zionism that is not also
anti-Semitism, that they have organized a petition against Eisen and those
who publish him. Among the signatories are people who are only marginall
y less openly anti-Semitic than Eisen himself, and include some of
Israel's worst academic moonbats. Other neofascist leftists however are
rallying to Eisen's defense.