Israel rejects a nice Jewish girl

The link above is to the blog of a Jewish-American International Solidarity Movement activist.

The Jews of Baghdad

There is an organised campaign in development at the moment to have people believe that there was a concerted ethnic cleansing campaign against the Jews of the Arab world after the establishment of the state of Israel. Here's Professor Geoffrey Alderman promoting a typically dishonest zionist take on this in the Guardian:

The most dramatic incidence of ethnic cleansing in modern times has been the systematic ethnic cleansing of Jews from Arab lands. It is a pity the mayor appears either to be in ignorance of this or to be indifferent to it.
Prof Geoffrey Alderman
London

This campaign is still quite young as it couldn't be mounted while many of the emigrants were still alive because the idea that there was "systematic ethnic cleansing of Jews from Arab lands" is a complete lie. Perhaps the professor is ignorant of this or he is indifferent to it. It doesn't matter because the Professor is only one player in this campaign to rewrite the history of Arab Jewry and view it through the distorting prism of zionist historiography.

I have posted before about the cases of Egypt and of Morocco. The article linked to the headline above is about the Jews of Iraq and is written by David Shasha. Here's a piece but please read the whole thing:

The recent call to have the 1941 events in Iraq, known as the Farhud*, linked to the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust is yet another step in the regrettable process of having Sephardic Jewish history measured and calibrated along the lines of Ashkenazi Jewish history. Such a phenomenon is more than lamentable. Under a strange confluence of forces, merging Sephardi weakness, Ashkenazi dominance and the pressing need to lay out Arabs as a primal demonic and anti-Semitic force, a committee has now been formed in Los Angeles – replete with a website and a media campaign – to formally insert the Farhud into Holocaust history thereby distorting the historical and political context of the original event.

I'll be returning to this issue in future posts as this is going to become a live issue in coming months or years with the zionists trying to extort money from Arab states as part of some "peace" deal if that ever comes.

*violent dispossession

The new "anti-semitism"

I'm sure you've guessed what this is about already. Just in case, it's yet another report of the campaign in America, to silence Israel's critics. What could be done, M Junaid Alam asks, when it was revealed that Israel was far more Goliath than David:

Enter the "new anti-Semitism." This doctrine turns reality on its head, declaring criticism of Israel's racist behavior to be itself racist ­ "anti-Semitic." Empathy for Palestinians being beaten, bullied, and bulldozed out of existence, the doctrine goes, is nothing but some disguised expression of Jew-hatred. Goose-stepping Germans and uprooted Palestinians are portrayed as part of the same unbroken line of anti-Semitism.

The article details the orchestrated campaign against Arab-American Professors at Columbia University.

Hit parade of hatred

Police have produced a league table of race attacks by ethnicity of the victims. It would appear that perceived Muslims, Asians and north Africans are the most likely victims:

Compared with a white European, an African or Caribbean person was 11 times more likely to be the victim of a racial crime, an Arab or Egyptian 12 times, an Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi 13 times and a southern or eastern European eight times. A Chinese or Japanese person was five times more at risk and analysts claim a Jewish person was three times as likely to be subject to a racially or religiously aggravated crime.

Curiously the article in the Guardian, by Hugh Muir, describes attacks on Jews as "religiously aggravated". He doesn't make clear whether he means that Jews are attacked because of their beliefs or because of the beliefs of the their attackers.

"No official in the world trusts Israel"

So said al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade's Jihad Jaara when Irish Special Branch officers promised not to let any harm come to him at the hands of Israel's secret service: Mossad.

Jaara has lived in Dublin since being exiled following the Church of the Nativity siege in Bethlehem in 2002. In spite of assurances from Israel:

Irish intelligence authorities tracked down two Israeli intelligence (Mossad) agents who were apparently attempting to enter the country to assist in the assassination of a senior Palestinian militant, Irish newspaper Evening Herald. reported.

Not surprisingly, the Israeli foreign ministry has denied the allegations and equally unsurprisingly:

Ireland has not filed an official complaint against Israel as of yet, but Irish security sources said the country is "concerned."

Uprooting Morocco's Jews

I found this very interesting site whilst looking up the expression "human dust". It's a little bit quirky (Ben Gurion is referred to as President for example) but overall very good and the author seems like an earnest chap. Here's his take on the emigration of Jews from Morocco:

I believe that the emigration of Moroccan Jews was an uprooting of an entire population. As a whole, Moroccan Jews lived well with Muslims and under the Sultan, who is now known as King. Groups from outside the country disturbed these relations, turning Jews against Muslims and vice versa. These outside groups included: European and American governments; European and American Jewish Zionist and non-Zionist groups; and the Israeli Government. These groups may have believed they were acting in the best interests of the Jews. I believe, however, that they were more interested in using the Jews to pursue their own parochial agendas. An ambiguous attitude of the Moroccan nationalists and political parties toward integrating Jews into the political life of Morocco also facilitated the uprooting of the Jews.

Jews against Zionism

I just found this whilst looking for a book by Lenni Brenner. It's a web page with transcripts and downloads from a talk organised by Roland Rance and me back in 2003. We were launching a group around the idea, Jews against Zionism, for leaflet drops at demos and talks. For what was intended to be the first event, we hired a room for 40 people at the University of London Union. As it turned out we had to move to a room for 80 and still there were people standing.

The speakers that night were Alice Coy of the ISM, film maker Haim Bresheeth, and Lenni Brenner, author of exposés of zionist collaboration with the nazis including Zionism in the age of the Dictators. and 51 Documents.

Alice Coy

Life in Rafah

I went to Rafah, in the Gaza strip. Its a refugee camp of over 140,000 people piled in to a village of 300 people. Two thirds of the children there are anaemic, and that's not because they don't have enough food but that they are too terrified to eat or process the food that they are getting properly. Over half of them wet their beds, hundreds are shot. You meet children walking around that are so traumatized they can't communicate like normal people any more...

Haim Bresheeth

Understanding the Occupation

Most of my family was destroyed in the holocaust - in different concentration camps and in the Warsaw ghetto and I was born in a refugee camp in Italy immediately after the war... I'm not saying this in order to elicit some sympathy because this is nonsensical on this audience [mostly Jewish] obviously. I'm saying this in order to explain why its so easy for me to understand the Palestinians in Gaza and in the rest of Palestine. It is very easy for me to understand them because they live in a combination of a concentration camp and Warsaw ghetto for so many years that we have stopped counting...

Lenni Brenner

Israeli Navy Founded By Mussolini Fascists

Jabotinsky is the founder of the Zionist revisionist movement which is the ideological heart of the Likud party. He personally had lived in Italy for three years. He began to realize that the British were just using the Zionists - sort of like they use the Protestants in Northern Ireland so he began to look for another mandatory to take over - it had to be a rival to Britain. So sure enough he began to orient towards Mussolini and eventually Mussolini set up a squadron of Betar - the youth group of the Zionist revisionists at Mussolini's neighbourhood academy. From their [Zionist] publication in Italy at the time:

"...this year there are forty nine cadets - our human material is extremely intelligent, the majority are university students and thirty of them belong to fascist university youth..."

In other words they were members of the Italian fascist movement - they weren't just pro-Mussolini - they joined his movement. All of them became founders of the Israeli navy - it was founded by members of the Italian fascist party!

And here are the closing remarks by the meeting's Chairman, Roland Rance:

Zionism is Against Jews

For many of us the reason that we are adamantly opposed to Zionism is because, yes it's committing crimes against the Palestinian people, yes because it's condemning Jews in Israel to a life of insecurity and danger, and, yes because the Zionist movement ultimately said that Jewish life outside Palestine is not worth savings - the first president of the state of Israel, Chaim Weisman, referred to the Jews of Europe as human dust not worth saving. For many of us the reason for our adamant opposition to Zionism is not only though it is as well seeing what it is doing to the Palestinians and seeing that there cannot be any solution, any just solution, any lasting solution in the middle-east that doesn't undo the wrong that has been done by the Zionist movement to Palestinians, but also because we say that, if there is again an upsurge of hatred against Jews, the Zionists will not be the ones to protect us - they will be the ones to betray us. And for me certainly its an absolute fundamental for my whole political existence that Zionism is not just something I am opposed to - it is my enemy. This is part of the reason why we are taking steps to establish an organisation Jews Against Zionism

For further information on Jews against Zionism email: info@jewsagainstzionism.org

Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner

Ok, I know my promise is now in tatters. Here's more on Ken by way of letters to the Guardian. Sadly, and typically, the Guardian gives the first and last word to the Zionists with Professor Shalom Lappin accusing Ken of "posing as a defender of the Palestinians and a champion of international justice" and the Jewish Chronicle's. Professor Geoffrey Alderman invoking "the systematic ethnic cleansing. of Jews from Arab lands" without offering any descriptions or evidence of course. There's also a letter from the Herut-Likud UK saying that if you "cut Israel, Jews everywhere bleed a little. Even here in London." And one from Israel suggesting that the opposition of Likud members to Sharon's policies amounts to unity with Ken.

So much for the cons; here are the pros:

Ken Livingstone's was a brilliant and honest piece. As a Jew in my 50s, I have been disgusted at the way in which the spectre of anti-semitism have been used as a shield against any criticism of Israel's repugnant and racist policies towards the Palestinians over 60 years. He eloquently reminds us there are still some universal values and that the lessons of the Holocaust apply equally to Israel. I feel proud to be a Londoner having a mayor like Livingstone.
Martin White
London

As a member of Jews for Justice for Palestinians and Just Peace UK, I applaud Ken Livingstone for speaking out about the creeping ethnic cleansing in the Palestinian territories. Israel is not driving the Palestinians out in an obvious way as in 1948, but is making life unbearable for them by means of house demolitions, uprooting of trees and confiscation of land for the constant expansion of settlements and the wall.

The hype over the "peace process" is an illusion to mask Israel's unilateral forcing of the Palestinians into a so-called interim state, which Sharon really intends to be permanent ghettoes or reservations, linked by tunnels which Israel can close off at will. This massive injustice is, as Livingstone points out, a threat to world peace because of the anger and violence it creates.
Deborah Maccoby (she gets around)
London

Many members of the Jewish community would be outraged at the patronising suggestion that criticism of Israel is necessarily taken by them as anti-Jewish. Many Jewish people strive to distance themselves from the brutal acts of Sharon and his government against the Palestinian people. The view that the Israeli government and its followers endeavour to use the religious card to repel criticism is widely held, not least by members of the Jewish community, many of whom have been some of the most articulate critics of Israeli policy.
Jamal Sheri
London

Ken's offhand offensive comment has been cynically manipulated by supporters of Israel desperate to link those opposing Israel's self-destructive policies to racism. Having several weeks ago visited villages now separated from the land that is their livelihood by the West Bank barrier, one can only conclude that one of its aims is to drive people away into the ever-growing Palestinian diaspora. Only this week, I had defenders of Sharon compare me to Auschwitz experimenter Josef Mengele while I was addressing a public meeting. The continuing row merely serves to emphasise the depths to which some in the pro-Israel lobby will sink to apply all blame for the current situation towards anyone but successive Israeli governments.
Ben Soffa
Member, Jewish Students for Justice for Palestinians

Mock shock at the Guardian

It could have been a good day in the Guardian. today as Ken Livingstone's withering riposte to Britain's King of the Jews*, Henry Grunwald, was published. Sadly,the Guardian. went and spoiled it by publishing an absurd shock horror piece by Hugh Muir on its front page about Ken's article. In it, Hugh Muir accuses Ken of having "reignited his dispute with Britain's Jewish leaders by launching a provocative attack on the "war criminal" Ariel Sharon." Imagine! Having to use quotes around the expression "war criminal" when describing a war criminal. It's particularly odd considering that Sharon has been so described in a Guardian. editorial before now. Hugh Muir continues in that vain throughout the article. "The London mayor accused Israel of "ethnic cleansing". We don't use quotes for ethnic cleansing anymore. It's a tragedy of our time that ethnic cleansing has passed into the language.

Also on the downside of the Guardian. today there's a letter from Louise Ellman MP, repeating the lie that Ken Livingstone used the Nazi jibe only after learning that the reporter was Jewish.

So, to Ken's article. It's really rather good. Starting with a brilliant round-up of the menace of racism:

Racism is a uniquely reactionary ideology, used to justify the greatest crimes in history - the slave trade, the extermination of all original inhabitants of the Caribbean, the elimination of every native inhabitant of Tasmania, apartheid. The Holocaust was the ultimate, "industrialised" expression of racist barbarity.

and working through his support for various Jewish causes:

As mayor, I have pressed for police action over anti-semitic attacks at the highest level, and my administration has backed a series of initiatives of importance to the Jewish community, including hosting the Anne Frank exhibition at City Hall and measures to ensure the go-ahead for the north London eruv.

and on to when his first run-in with the Zionists of the Board of Deputies began.

Throughout the 1970s, I worked happily with the Board of Deputies in campaigns against the National Front. Problems began when, as leader of the Greater London Council, I rejected the board's request that I should fund only Jewish organisations that it approved of. The Board of Deputies was unhappy that I funded Jewish organisations campaigning for gay rights and others that disagreed with policies of the Israeli government.

Relations with the board took a dramatic turn for the worse when I opposed Israel's illegal invasion of Lebanon, culminating in the massacres at the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila. The board also opposed my involvement in the successful campaign in 1982 to convince the Labour party to recognise the PLO as the legitimate voice of the Palestinian people.

and finally:

All racist and anti-semitic attacks must be stamped out. However, the reality is that the great bulk of racist attacks in Europe today are on black people, Asians and Muslims - and they are the primary targets of the extreme right. For 20 years Israeli governments have attempted to portray anyone who forcefully criticises the policies of Israel as anti-semitic. The truth is the opposite: the same universal human values that recognise the Holocaust as the greatest racist crime of the 20th century require condemnation of the policies of successive Israeli governments - not on the absurd grounds that they are Nazi or equivalent to the Holocaust, but because ethnic cleansing, discrimination and terror are immoral.

They are also fuelling anger and violence across the world. For a mayor of London not to speak out against such injustice would not only be wrong - but would also ignore the threat it poses to the security of all Londoners.

I'm guessing that the Zionist mainstream will be pulling out all the stops against Livingstone now. Geoffrey Alderman, in the Jewish Chronicle. has called on all Jewish members of the Labour party to demand Livingstone's expulsion. I wish he wasn't a member of Labour as well but I don't think that this would stop him winning the mayoralty of London again; it might even strengthen his hand.

* A commenter who calls himself Freddie has said the following: "Your reference to a "king of the Jews" is offensive, or didn't you know this either?" The reference was to express my objection to Henry Grunwald describing himself, in a Guardian. article, as "the elected leader of the British Jewish community". If anyone whose opinion I respect objects then please let me know via both the comments box and email. Thanks!

Separation wall

This Ha'aretz. article by Gideon Levy shows how Israel's wall through Palestine has forced a separation, literally:

Terry Bulata and Salah Iyad are separating after 14 years of marriage. They have already spoken to their children, Zina and Yasmin. The two girls will be under joint custody - three nights with Dad, three nights with Mom, and every other weekend with one of the parents. The arrangement is familiar, but the reason less so: the separation fence. Dad is not allowed on one side of it, and Mom is not allowed on the other. The wall runs along the main street near their house, cutting through their town, Abu Dis. It's eight meters high, impossible to cross. That's why they have to separate.

Silent Majority?

There is a silent majority of Jews in the US who feel completely alienated from mainline Jewish groups because those groups are no longer in line with their central beliefs of justice and equality. Most Jews in the US are not affiliated with the institutions that purport to represent us. Never in American history have so many Jewish groups sprung up outside of the mainstream of the Jewish community, in defiance of the flawed leadership of our community.

Now there's a bold statement. Is it true I wonder? It's a passage from the transcript of a speech by Liat Weingart that I found on Electronic Intifada. about Jewish Voice for Peace supporting the Presbytarian Church of the USA in its selective divestment campaign against Israel.

Frankly, I find the speech itself quite, well, Judeocentric. Look at this, for example:

Outside of Israel, most Jews are as secure as most other human beings. However, the subjective experience of the millennia of persecution and genocide is quite another thing. Since my visit to Auschwitz last October, the constant fear that I and many other Jews live with has come to the surface of my consciousness. In some ways, my nightmares are a new phenomenon. But in reality, Auschwitz and the legacy of persecution and targeting that my family faced was always in my house as I grew up. No one talked about it, but you could feel it. A constant level of tension and anxiety that you wouldn't notice until you woke up with a stiff neck and sore muscles, not having any idea what you spent the night running from. I know this is a common experience for Jews. One of my Jewish friends wonders which neighbors will hide her children just in case there's a severe anti-Semitic outbreak. I've heard a number of Jews say that they think about having an extra suitcase packed, "just in case." My grandfather stocked our cabinets with pieces of bread wrapped in cloth, "just in case."

And this is in America. When I stayed on a kibbutz I remember the young members sneering at the "old Poles" for stashing food. Food was plentiful on the kibbutz but these people had endured concentration camps or ghettos and clearly never got over it. But for this disorder to pass on to succeeding generations requires cultivation. How can that happen in an open society like America? And why does it not happen in the UK or indeed anywhere else? And what is this about "millennia of persecution"? This is ahistorical nonsense. It links biblical mythology to what we know and it links modern racial anti-semitism to violent religious disputations and back again to social and economic rebellions.

It worries me that a Jewish woman feels that she can only approach the Jewish community by speaking of real and imagined threats to and sufferings of Jews. Why can't she just say what's wrong?

Five minutes and fifty-five seconds

No this isn't the title of the latest composition by John Cage. It's the amount of time granted to Isaac Herzog to tell a complete pack of lies regarding the number, location and status of Israel's illegal colonial settlers in occupied Palestinian territory without any serious counter-argument from his interviewer even though she must surely have known that he was lying. This 5 minutes 55 seconds was his response to 40 seconds granted to the PLO's Afif Safieh on the same subject. Afif Safieh wasn't given a chance to refute any of the lies told by Herzog. It seems that following the lying Lord Hutton and the Malcolm Balen report, the BBC has upped its pro-Israel position from about 80% to 99%. Please don't just take my word for this. Listen to the programme via the link in the headline (today only) and you might like to write to "contact Today" to complain. I'm not aware of anything in the BBC charter that says it has to side with racist war criminals.

Foot on Grunwald

Michael Foot weighs into Henry Grunwald.

Sorry tale

Henry Grunwald is most unjust to Ken Livingstone in the language he uses (We all deserve an apology, March 2). If Ken were an anti-semite we would indeed be in trouble but the whole of his political life tells a different story. The controversy which led to the argument started when a journalist was seemingly attacking a group which Ken is determined to defend. Maybe the apologies should start from that journalist.
Michael Foot
London

Now then Henry, accept defeat and "move on".

Frummer in a mikve

Thanks to Josh Narins for pointing me in the direction of some non-zionist Frummer. blogs. I am posting this by way of a bookmark. It's one frummer's take on the goings on in his local mikve. I'll return to it later; the frummer blogs, not the mikve.

The word of the beloved leader

Henry Grunwald, acting in his capacity as, he says, "the elected leader of the British Jewish community" writes in today's Guardian, that "We all deserve an apology". I know I didn't vote for Henry Grunwald or anyone else on the Board of Deputies so I asked my mother if she voted for him. She's a member of the United Synagogue. That's the orthodox congregation headed by Chief Rabbi Jonothan Sacks. She told me that she hadn't been aware of any elections but as she never pays a sub to the Board perhaps they wouldn't invite her to vote. Now I haven't been a synagogue member since a Lubavitch rabbi applauded the Shatila and Sabra massacres during Rosh Hashana, 1982. So people like me who are non-synagogue members cannot vote for the Board. People like my mother, who are members of a synagogue but don't pay the Board, it seems, can't vote either. Ok, that seems fair. But what isn't fair is the Guardian allowing Henry Grunwald to pose as "the elected leader of the British Jewish community". The now? That's just not fair but it gets worse. He writes as if he has his finger on the pulse of the whole community.

I should have issued a health warning up front. This is yet another post on the Ken Livingstone saga. I know I promised not to but I did keep my fingers crossed and it was Grunwald and the Guardian who reopened the thing.

Anyway, having misrepresented himself as "the elected leader of the British Jewish community" he goes on to misrepresent what Ken Livingstone said to sometime reporter, Oliver Finegold.

It is worth remembering exactly what happened. After a reporter clearly identified himself as Jewish, the mayor responded with a remark deliberately calibrated to cause maximum pain and offence.

Now that isn't quite true. Ken started off by asking said reporter if he was a Nazi war criminal. Then the reporter responded by saying that he was Jewish and that, therefore, he was offended by what Ken had said. Ken continued in the same vain. Now that is not the same as what the beloved, indeed elected, leader said. Anyone who has heard the tape will know that Ken was not in calibration mode at the time; inebriation? possibly but calibration? definitely not.

After a brief tribute to Ken's sincerity, Grunwald returns to his misrepresentation of what happened between Ken and Finegold, tacked on to the end of a list of Ken's wrongdoings regarding the holocaust:

He has used them as reference points not just for Daily Mail group journalists, but also for international capitalism, Britain's record in Ireland and, in 1987, Camden council's housing policy for homosexuals. On this occasion he went one step further. By employing Holocaust imagery to address an insult to somebody who identified himself as a Jew, the mayor overstepped the bounds of acceptable behaviour for an elected official. That is the core of our complaint.

He then goes on to complain that Ken has not taken Board of Deputies subsidiary the Community Security Trust's statistics on anti-semitism seriously enough, before committing the mother of all the chutzpahs thus:

There is deep anger in the Jewish community, not just at the remarks themselves, but at the manner in which the mayor has dragged us through this controversy, continually ascribing our legitimate concerns to media campaigns and attempts to secure political gain.

Actually it was the Board, the Holocaust Education Trust and a ragbag of zionists who turned this into a media campaign. Ken kept quiet pretty much, except for his weekly statements. And it was the same ragbag of zionists who dragged us through this controversy.

They have made the Jewish community feel tense, isolated, humiliated and a target for insults.

Not true! It was the Board who caused the toe-curling embarrassment for our community. It was the Board who ended up humiliated. As for tension, I must confess to feeling some tension when I thought Ken might actually apologise to such a sorry band of opportunists. But. I'm sorry, we're not finished yet. If Henry Grunwald's self-importance hasn't become apparent yet then cop this:

Sixty years after the liberation of Auschwitz, what is it we are being asked to move on from [by Blair among others] - an offensive remark by a leading public figure, or our apparently futile attempts to preserve the memory of the Holocaust and the safety of future generations of Jews and all mankind?

Here's hoping that the Board of Deputies has made yet another bad miscalculation.

Dr Tonge's Palestinian patience

Impressive letter by Lib Dem, Dr Jenny Tonge, condemning the latest suicide bombing in Tel Aviv but belying Conal Urquhart's (et al) report that it was this that broke the "calm":

I was disappointed and dismayed that a suicide bomber should jeopardise the peace process between Israel and Palestine (Tel Aviv bomber's family shunned, March 1) and would hope that terrorist groups all over the Middle East will be patient enough to allow Mahmoud Abbas the freedom to negotiate with Ariel Sharon. They certainly need the patience. During the ceasefire, the Israelis have carried out two assassinations of al-Aqsa Brigade members; a 15-year-old boy was killed and a 14-year-old severely injured by soldiers for throwing stones. A 16-year-old boy was shot dead for allegedly carrying a knife and a resident of Rafah was killed walking near his home by gunfire from an Israeli settlement.
The expansion of settlements continues in the West Bank, as does the settler road building and construction of the security wall. Water and land resources disappear each day, and shepherds cannot graze their sheep on their own land south of Hebron. The Palestinians need the patience of Job, and they are to be congratulated for their restraint. Israel's behaviour is totally unacceptable and yet gets no coverage from your newspaper.
Dr Jenny Tonge MP
Lib Dem, Richmond Park

She's actually quitting at the next election, believed to be due on 5/5/2005. Bad news for seekers after truth on Palestine.

Did they know? Does it matter?

Picking up on an earlier post of mine - Hitler, Adolf, zionist approval of, Alphonse Van Worden says that it really is no excuse to say that the early supporters of Hitler cannot have known of the genocide to come as a result of nazi policies.

It is doubtful that anyone hanged at Nuremberg, or even Hitler himself, knew of the genocide to come at the time when Prinz was welcoming Nazism. That ridding Germany of Jews was a fantasy of key Nazis, everybody knew at that time, including Prinz.

The issue is whether supporting everything about Nazism except the Final Solution - that is, supporting fascism - is excuseable just for not advocating atrocities at the outer horror limit of the human imagination. This is important because this is the position advertised as admirable currently by the leading world power. Maureen Dowd assured NY Times readers in the early days of Schwartenegger's campaign for governor, that there was nothing to worry about. He loved Hitler, true, but 'as a business model.' His fascism has nothing to do with Judeocide, so its suitable for approval by American liberals. As if the Final Solution was the accident, the wrong turn, the anecdotal ‘excess’ which is the stain on an otherwise acceptable political project. This is also why framing current Israeli policy as possibly heading for gas chambers has the tendency to diminish the unacceptability of its current reality, which is a situation wherein gas chambers +are an option+ and the failure to build them boasted of as a kind of charitable work, because surely the refraining is voluntary (there's nothing to stop the Israeli regime carrying out an extermination but the organized resistance of the designated untermenschen).

Alphonse Van Worden is quite a new blog and is well worth a see.

America's demographic problem

There is good news and bad news. The good news is that the reports of the decline of Jewish and pro-Israel influence, and the rise of Arab/Muslim influence in the American political system are at the moment greatly exaggerated. The bad news is that change is underway, and the relative shift described above is occurring.

But look at Richard Baehr's reasoning here.
According to him, Jewish influence in America is in decline because of various demographic shifts. *Health warning" This reads like a party political broadcast for the Israeli Labour Party.

From 1990 to 2000, he points out, the Hispanic population grew by 13 million. just over 50%. The black population grew by 4 million, or 11%. The Asian
population grew by 4 million, or over 60%. The population of non-Hispanic whites grew by 6 million or 3%. Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 22% of the country's population growth during the ten year period, Hispanics for half of it. Non-Hispanic whites are now 70% of the population, headed for 50% by 2050.

Meanwhile, from a peak of 6 million American Jews, or 4% of the US population in 1950, Jews are now just about 5.2 million in number, according to the latest Jewish population surveys, or a bit less than 2% of the US population, and the trend points down to maybe three million in the next but one generation.

Horrid isn't it? But it gets worse:

With an intermarriage rate around 50%, and a fertility rate of 1.6 children per Jewish woman, Jews are committing population suicide. American Jews marry late and often never marry, and have fewer children as a result. The commitment to abortion rights as a pre-eminent political issue strikes me a particularly odd, with Jewish numbers declining at an accelerating rate. Rather than being aggressive advocates of abortion rights, Jews might more rationally be advocates of carrying unwanted pregnancies to term, and then giving up the babies for adoption. This is especially the case since many Jewish women marry late and have difficulty conceiving.

And worse again:

As Jews decline in number, he points with a quivering finger at the Arab and Muslim population in America heading in the other direction. Baehr cites two academic studies putting the US Muslim population at between 1.8 and 2.9 million, with the total Arab/Muslim community "probably about 3.5 million, two thirds the size of the Jewish community."

Perhaps it's time for Mr Baehr to emigrate (I mean "return") to Israel where ethnic cleansing and an array of apartheid laws maintain the "demographic balance" by force. But, no, there's a problem there too. You see American support for Israel is now under threat:

in the 2004 campaign, four Jews - George Soros, Peter Lewis, Steven Bing and Herbert Sandler - gave over $80 million to Democratic political funds. While "this level of political giving by a few individuals has never happened before in the history of the country, Israel is not the leading agenda item for any of them. They were Bush-haters, pure and simple. This is true of much of the political money that comes from Jews in Hollywood (from where Bing hails). Israel is not the motivator for their contributions.

Oh dear, oh dear.

"Relative calm"

Electronic Intifada picked up on the media's (in the case the Los Angeles Times) deliberate obscuring of Israeli atrocities against Palestinians by way of the expression "relative calm".

The headline proclaims: "Palestinian Suicide bomber Shatters Calm of late." The lead sentence then goes on to state that this bomber "shattered a months-long period of relative calm..."

The fact is, however, that the truce and this "calm" were shattered long before this. The last suicide bombing against Israeli civilians was Nov. 1, 2004. It took three Israeli lives. Since that time, while Israelis have basked in "relative calm," 170 Palestinian men, women, and children have been killed.

During this LA Times' "relative calm," another 379 Palestinian men, women, and children were injured and maimed. Anyone who has been to the West Bank or Gaza knows what this means: leg bones splintered, intestines torn open, teeth shattered.

Also, of course, during this "calm" over 8,000 Palestinians have been sitting in Israeli prison cells, routinely abused and grotesquely humiliated; over 300 of them children.

Hitler, Adolf, zionist approval of,

I was just looking up the index of Israel Shahak's Jewish History, Jewish Religion when I saw the above explosive reference. I know it's almost a cliché now to speak of zionist agreement with anti-semitism and even more of one to refer to zionist/nazi collaboration but I really didn't know how deep it ran in ideological terms:

Perhaps the most shocking example of this type is the delight with which some Zionist leaders in Germany welcomed Hitler's rise to power, because they shared his belief in the primacy of 'race' and his hostility to the assimilation of Jews among 'Aryans'. They congratulated Hitler on his triumph over the common enemy - the forces of liberalism. Dr Joachim Prinz, a Zionist rabbi who subsequently emigrated to the USA, where he rose to be vice-chairman of the World Jewish Congress and a leading light in the World Zionist Organization (as well as a great friend of Golda Meir), published in 1934 a special book, Wir Juden (We, Jews), to celebrate Hitler's so-called German Revolution and the defeat of liberalism:

The meaning of the German Revolution for the German nation will eventually be clear to those who have created it and formed its image. Its meaning for us must be set forth here: the fortunes of liberalism are lost. The only form of political life which has helped Jewish assimilation is sunk.

The victory of Nazism rules out assimilation and mixed marriages as an option for Jews. 'We are not unhappy about this,' said Dr Prinz. In the fact that Jews are being forced to identify them- selves as Jews, he sees 'the fulfillment of our desires'. And further:

We want assimilation to be replaced by a new law: the declaration of belonging to the Jewish nation and Jewish race. A state built upon the principle of the purity of nation and race can only be honored and respected by a Jew who declares his belonging to his own kind. Having so declared himself, he will never be capable of faulty loyalty towards a state. The state cannot want other Jews but such as declare themselves as belonging to their nation. It will not want Jewish flatterers and crawlers. It must demand of us faith and loyalty to our own interest. For only he who honors his own breed and his own blood can have an attitude of honor towards the national will of other nations.

The whole book is full of similar crude flatteries of Nazi ideology, glee at the defeat of liberalism and particularly of the ideas of the French Revolution and great expectations that, in the congenial atmosphere of the myth of the Aryan race, Zionism and the myth of the Jewish race will also thrive.

In fairness, Shahak goes on to say that "of course, Dr Prinz, like many other early sympathizers and allies of Nazism, did not realize where that movement (and modern antisemitism generally) was leading" but then "many people at present do not realize where zionism - the movement in which Dr Prinz was an honored figure - is tending."