Jews sans frontieres

They say Jews are quick learners, don't they?

2008-10-07T12:47:00.006+01:00

Compare and Contrast:

This is from David Nirenberg's book, Communities of Violence, describing Christian violence against Jews on Holy Thursday.

And this is from Haaretz, today:

"[MK Abbas Zakor] claims that on every Day of Atonement, jewish youth gathers at the entrance of towns and "hunt" passing Arab drivers. Without distinguishing between man and woman,elderly or child, they, he says, stone the passing cars. "Despite repeated complaint received by the different police stations, police never sends a single policeman to disperse the racist youth" (Haaretz, October 7 2008)

News from Occupied Egypt

2008-10-07T02:49:00.001+01:00

While the Egyptian army is using new high tech U.S. devices to discover and close tunnels that break through the siege of Gaza, The Egyptian police is rounding up and roughing up Egyptian solidarity activists who are trying to travel to Gaza through the Rafah crossing.

Check out The Arabway Blog: In particular :

Gaza solidarity activist detained

Gaza solidarity activists abused in custody

Prosecutor to interrogate Gaza solidarity activist

There would be no siege of Gaza without the active and engaged support of the government of Egypt.

Reading these my train of thought turned to a conversation I had a year ago with an Israeli writer, a bohemian guy, progressive as can be, leftist, the whole nine yards. He told me that Egypt was on the verge on an explosion, (which I know) and the only hope for Israelis is Omar Suleiman (which made my jaw drop). For the sake of humanity, if Omar Suleiman is your "hope" maybe you need to ask yourself some real hard questions. Questions like, 'how did I sink so low?"

Below is the picture of the U.S. and Israel chief agent in Egypt, Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, and the man in charge of keeping Egypt in the leash of the U.S. and Israel.

Suleiman gets a lot of love from Westerners. Jeffrey Fleishman from the LA Times practically had an orgasm while writing about him. See for yourself!

He appears briefly on TV, not saying much, if anything at all, and then fades into the secrecy and quiet diplomacy that men like him prefer. One day he’s in Jerusalem, the next in Gaza, then back to Egypt to whisper in the ear of his boss, President Hosni Mubarak. ( LA Times July 16 2008)

Wow! What a man! notice how he "fades into secrecy." Perhaps straight into his batmobil. But then Fleishman also wrote that "Egypt is a democracy." Sure, of course, after all, if Israel is a democracy, anything can be a democracy.

Unfortunately, apart from being in the figurehead of Egypt's repression (a manly job, for sure) Suleiman gets so much love because he's a puppy of the U.S.

And Western journalists, bless their heart, just love that kind of puppies, even the torturing kind, because...

The gifted military strategist (is he Egypt's champion in Grand Theft Auto? what war did he win?) has years of diplomatic relations with the U.S., Israel and the Arab world, and he’s regarded as a pragmatist likely to carry on Egypt’s privatization (which made Egypt such a rich country) and economic reform. (comments in red are obviously mine)

For comparison, this is what a real puppy looks like:

Unarmed Palestinian fishermen attack Israeli navy again - again

2008-10-06T11:58:00.002+01:00

Fortunately, as can be seen in this video, the navy was able to defend itself with live ammo, shells, and a high-powered water cannon:

According to the Chinese news agency Xinhua on Oct. 5, one fisherman was shot in the leg. Interestingly, Xinhua has put the article in their sports section. Perhaps they're taking their cue from former New York Times bureau chief Chris Hedges, who in an interview with NPR on Oct 30, 2001 noted the sportsmanlike conduct of Israeli forces in Gaza:

And it was--I mean, I've seen kids shot in Sarajevo. I mean, snipers would shoot kids in Sarajevo. I've seen death squads kill families in Algeria or El Salvador. But I'd never seen soldiers bait or taunt kids like this and then shoot them for sport. It was--I just--even now, I find it almost inconceivable. And I went back every day, and every day it was the same.

Note from Mark Elf - every so often I post a post just above a post by a fellow poster, in this case Nedster. Apologies for the previous post that has necessitated the repeat of this post for those who don't read further than the latest post. Got that? Good!

Writing on the wall for Palestine

2008-10-06T10:32:00.003+01:00

the writing on the wall for Israel

By jet set graffiti

and nakba60.org.uk

Unarmed Palestinian fishermen attack Israeli navy again

2008-10-06T10:09:00.004+01:00

And it was--I mean, I've seen kids shot in Sarajevo. I mean, snipers would shoot kids in Sarajevo. I've seen death squads kill families in Algeria or El Salvador. But I'd never seen soldiers bait or taunt kids like this and then shoot them for sport. It was--I just--even now, I find it almost inconceivable. And I went back every day, and every day it was the same.

UPDATE: ISM Rafah has the story behind the video.

Beyond Beyond Chutzpah

2008-10-05T14:12:00.002+01:00

This is a coincidence coming hot on the heels of a post about a wannabe A-list Israel lobbyist. Just browsing the Guardian site and what did I see? Norman Finkelstein's Beyond Chutzpah has been updated to take into account how it was received first time round back in 2005. Goodness, was it that long ago?

Can Israel be criticised? Jewish American academic Norman Finkelstein, author of The Holocaust Industry, argues that legitimate criticism of Israeli policy is possible, although, as he discovered, it may mean losing your job and being labelled a "Jewish anti-Semite". Finkelstein rejects the view that the Israel-Palestine conflict is impossibly complex as a mystification, insists that the Palestinians were ethnically cleansed in 1948, and exposes Israel's damning human rights record. But most of all Beyond Chutzpah is a sustained attack on Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz's bestselling The Case for Israel, which Finkelstein calls one of "the most spectacular academic frauds ever published on the Israel-Palestine conflict". First published in 2005, this revised edition has a lengthy preface detailing the book's reception, while an epilogue by Frank J Menetrez concludes that Dershowitz destroyed Finkelstein's career. It's an academic spat of epic proportions, but while Finkelstein wins the moral argument, his combative tone, born of exasperation, is unlikely to calm the debate.

Short but sweet, that was the whole review by Ian Pindar and you can buy the book here.

David Toube of Harry's Place, liar, racist, buffoon and turncoat

2008-10-05T03:55:00.005+01:00

I know I used a similar headline to accurately describe Gilad Atzmon and I know it's an unabashed ad hominem attack on the dear leader - or one of them - of Harry's Place. But I'm finding myself increasingly incensed at this David t (Toube) character's propensity for hounding named individuals and his increasingly cavalier use of the antisemitism/racism slur. He is also becoming more successful at undermining the standing of his victims, jeopardising their employment and having them silenced on various forums. I was also shocked more recently at some of the people who fell for his ludicrous victim act over the Jenna Delich case.

And all the while, from posts and comments on his own blog and from his occasional sorties here I'm noticing that he is dishonest, racist (and not just against Muslims and Arabs) and stupid.

Anyway, here's a picture of the man himself while I gather my thoughts:

He works for a firm of solicitors up town, Cleary Gottleib, where he counts beans and makes sure they're kosher. When you read some of his "reasoning" on HP you'll see why he specialises in financial law and nothing too adversarial/intellectual. You can't take legions of trolls into court with you. You have to argue based on facts and against a backdrop of law unless your client's Jeremy Thorpe or some such. The photo is copyrighted by a Martin Turnbull who will invoice for its use so if the pic disappears you'll know he charges more than fifty pence.

I suppose the mob thuggery Toube unleashed against Jenna Delich was the last straw for me as far as Toube goes. Well not entirely just that but the fact that people who ought to have known better fell for his victim act over his blog being pulled for a vicious libel against an Israel critic who had apologised for her honest mistake of posting a link to the David Duke website. I ran into another misguided defence of Harry's Place over that saga just recently where the blogger thought that HP had simply posted that Jenna Delich had linked to the site. Toube created the impression that that was indeed all that happened. But it wasn't what happened. Following Delich's apology to the site, David Toube was tipped off about what had happened and he decided to make an example of this critic of Israel. He ran the post calling her a David Duke fan and he captioned a picture of her (what difference did the picture make to the post?) captioned "Sheffield-based academic, Jenna Delich - links to far right websites associated with the Ku Klux Klan". So he called her a "David Duke fan" and created a clear (to most people anyway) impression that she had links with websites associated with the Klan. Sorry, I know I'm going over old ground here but Toube is getting away with too many lies too often. Then, since she had apologised and it was not true that she is a David Duke fan or that she has links to Klan associated websites, she contacted HP's hosts who pulled the blog pending the removal of the libellous material. The openly libellous stuff was removed but Toube pretended that all he had done was run a post on the fact that she had linked to the David Duke site and that she had had his blog removed as a result. This is a lie. He lied, removed the more outrageous of the lies, lied again and had various bloggers who, as I said, ought to have known better, supporting him, seemingly oblivious to his lies. It's just possible that the lies were so outrageous that the more credulous assumed that they couldn't be made up.

I've been looking at HP more since that all happened and I can't quite believe David Toube's combination of deviousness, viciousness and stupidness. I've also had a little correspondence with him now and then. The first time was when I was slagging Atzmon on JSF for threatening Sue Blackwell with libel action and I congratulated him on an honourable mention he got in Private Eye. I really shouldn't do that given what I now know. More recently I was copied into a complaint to Toube by Deborah Fink because of libellous remarks about her in the comments to his blog. Tony Greenstein too was copied in. Poor Deborah was even more naive than I used to be about HP. Actually I found her email a little hard to follow but she seemed to be trying to appeal to Toube's better nature, which he doesn't have, or to make him think professionally as a lawyer about the implications of libelling someone or, most foolishly of all, to make him consider his credibility as an aspiring journalist...with the Jewish Chronicle (arf arf). Here's Toube's response:

Dear Deborah

I don't think you can have taken legal advice. I recommend that you do.

Then Tony Greenstein popped in. I was determined not to get involved.

This is the normal unpleasant stuff you expect from Harry's Place. Being unable to attack the message they try to shoot the messenger. Par for the course.

However most of this is not libellous, merely obnoxious and unpleasant. The
suggestion that Debbie has a personality disorder may well be defamatory since it would tend to lower her reputation in the eyes of most reasonable people Likewise any suggestion that she is anti-Semitic or tolerates or accepts anti-Semitism will be defamatory, unless proved, as was the case when Aaronovitch allowed similar comments on to his blog.

Toube warms to this rough and tumble:

Thanks Tony

This is precisely the point. Robust political debate operates better
when not conducted by proxy through lawyers.

As you will all know, I am the subject of a remarkable degree of abuse. [he even plays the victim in private correspondence. maybe he knew it would go on line once he lied about it on his blog] Those who have gone into print to attack me include a Milosovic groupie, a few trotskyites, the British branch of Hamas, a leading neo-Nazi, and other similar fringe types. So what?

The fact is: we wouldn't and shouldn't be doing this if we can't taker it.

Know what I mean?

Well Deborah must have felt encouraged by Tony's support and she was still naive enough to see a shred of decency in Mr Toube. Actually she did show some insight by recognising his quest for respectability. What she didn't take on board is just how indecent respectability has become in our post-modern age:

Yes, the comments on Harry's Place can hardly count as political debate, and really, they show themselves up.

For me, it is not a case of how thick my skin is as I do not get personally
wounded by people who I don't know or for whom I have little respect. The
point is, some of it is defamatory and you should not be allowing it on your
blog.

Now David, why don't you do the reasonable thing, and remove those comments
with a note saying they have been removed? If you want your blog to be
respectable you should warn commentators that personal abuse will not be
tolerated and not tolerate it!

Debbie

Now she is saying, it's that naivete again, that if you want debate, debate, but these legions of trolls are detracting from debate. But honest debate isn't Toube's thing so in his third response in the correspondence he has this to say:

Deborah

The thing is: you're absolutely welcome to come into the comments box of HP. You won't be deleted, because we don't delete. We think that the remedy for bad speech is more speech, not hopeless attempts to suppress expression.

I'm also very happy to aid and abet you in your never ending quest to draw attention to yourself. Sing in public, film it, whatever: we'll happily cover it and you can turn up and wind people up.

However I am not going to take part in a charade of this nature, dressed up as a discussion of English libel law.

This is the man who tries to lose people their jobs over their opinions if they criticise Israel remember. It is also the man who, I repeat, already issued two responses to the discussion that Deborah initiated. Well I couldn't stay out of it any longer so I popped in, quoting from his latest email and adding a comment of my own:

However I am not going to take part in a charade of this nature, dressed up as a discussion of English libel law.

You already did, you fucking idiot!

Now this is where it gets weird.

In a post headed An apology to Seth Freedman David t eventually gets round to mentioning the correspondence that I summarised above. I need to detour because I hadn't realised that this post reveals more of his dishonesty than I thought when I first saw it. The post is about how the Jerusalem Post removed some unpleasantness about Seth Freedman and apologised to him. Now see this:

I don’t think it is unreasonable to ask somebody to remove an abusive or threatening comment from a website. I have removed such comments myself from this website, when I have been asked to do so by the subject of the comment, and sometimes even by the person who made the offensive comment in the first place. People often write things in haste behind keyboards that later make them feel ashamed of themselves.

Seth Freedman recently wrote to me to draw my attention to a particularly unpleasant comment by a nasty piece of work. I removed that post, which I had not seen. Seth’s response was that I shouldn’t have troubled myself to do so now, and that my failure to have noticed the offensive post before he drew it to my attention demonstrated that it didn’t bother me.

I have also refused to remove comments. A few months ago, a semi-professional exhibitionist called Deborah Fink copied me into a round robin, with Greenstein, Machover, and a few others. In this email carousel, she demanded I remove certain posts, which she did not identify, but which she claimed were libellous. It turned out that what she regarded as defamatory, was a comment by a poster who speculated that she was mentally ill. As the comment was on a post in which Ms Fink was singing loudly through a megaphone about being a ’self hating Jew’, before being bundled off by the police while screaming ‘fascist’ at them, I decided that there was no cause to delete the observation. I did not mention these events at the time, because I got the impression that Deborah Fink wanted me to give her the opportunity to engage in public hystrionics, and I wanted no part in that. I’m kind of sorry that I have mentioned it now.

The first bit is the bit I hadn't noticed.

I have removed such comments myself from this website, when I have been asked to do so by the subject of the comment, and sometimes even by the person who made the offensive comment in the first place. People often write things in haste behind keyboards that later make them feel ashamed of themselves.

Not David Toube though. What happened to the "fan" in "David Duke fan"? Ashamed Mr Toube? Well yes and no obviously, he removed it (ashamed?) and then pretended that he hadn't (no shame when you have an airbrush, echoes of the other ahem non-zionist, Dr Hirsh). Did I mention his pious note about the photo disappearing? He wouldn't want anyone threatened. Did I mention that the caption didn't get a mention? Oh never mind, this post is too long already.

But the correspondence with Deborah Fink, Tony Greenstein and me. I don't know of any other correspondence. I don't recall Machover (Daniel or Moshe) or any others being copied in. They certainly didn't respond to the loop. I did. I called the fucking idiot a fucking idiot. Why did he airbrush me from that little piece of history? He really does know how to hurt a person.

I'm getting bored with this and I'm sure others must be too but I must point to some more of Toube's writings to show what a dodgy character he is. Where was I? I said he was a liar and a buffoon. What about the racism that he so casually, carelessly and dishonestly accuses others of? Well for some of that we have to return to his persistence in hounding Jenna Delich. Oh no. I've just noticed in the comeback post Toube denies having slandered Delich. Technically that's true of course but a half truth is worse than a lie, as the Talmud says. They libelled her. Here's the libellous post on a sock puppet blog that Toube seems to have created - the courage of the man, phew! - and here's the cleaned up one. The clue to his sheer dishonesty is in the url to the cleaned up version. The plot sickens as he shares his dishonesty with his following. But he still can't let go over the honest mistake so he had to apply his own lack of intellect to the article itself.

The article was full of facts demonstrating that Israel has committed a disproportionate number of atrocities against Palestinians when compared to the number of Israelis killed. It asks how Israel gets away with this and answering its own question says that it is because the State of Israel controls western media. Conflating Jews with Israel, Israeli oligarchs and the State of Israel, Toube carries on clutching at straws to prove his point that Jenna Delich is indeed an antisemite. See this comment on one of several posts on the same affair. It's directed at someone called TheIrie:

TheIrie

Tell us what you think of Quinn’s article, as a whole.

Do you think that Quinn is a racist, who has just ascribed to ‘Israel’, ‘Israeli oligarchs’ and ‘their sort’, standard conspiracies about control of Washington and global media which have been ascribed to Jews since the Protocols.

Seriously

What do you think?

Is this anti-semitism or not?

Now he's badgering a defender of Jenna Delich over the article itself and I don't think the guy succumbed to that but clearly it is Toube who is being antisemitic here. There is nothing of itself antisemitic in railing against Israeli oligarchs, Israel or "their sort". You have to be the kind of person who conflates Israel with Jews. Only antisemites and zionists do that. I need to detour back to Delich. There is no evidence to support the idea that she was praising his "analysis". It was the facts she claims she was referring to. I would guess as it happens that this Quinn may be antisemitic or some conspiracy nut but in the absence of any explanations of how Israel gets away with its persistent war crimes, what are people supposed to think? The powers that be go to great lengths to make Israel look like the lead agent in western/Israeli relations and Harry's Place certainly isn't offering any explanations. But within the constraints of the quote, Toube has not shown this Quinn guy to be antisemitic as such. Toube has made himself look more antisemitic but more still, stupid.

So I think I've demonstrated the liar and buffoon and the fact that his defence of Jewish supremacy, albeit by pretending that others are white supremacists or antisemites actually draws him into the antisemitic position of conflating Jews with the state he is so keen to defend, in spite of his ludicrous claim that he disapproves of its "ethnic definition" - lovely turn of phrase for uniquely racist state structure.

Toube has detection problems with other forms of racism too. It's not just his condemnations of anyone who criticises Israel that mark him out as a Jewish supremacist in denial, and his conflation of Jews and Israel that is grist to the mill of the Jew-hater but his intervention in a dispute between two Asians has him lecturing on what language non-whites can use when they insult each other. Toube accuses Faisal Bodi of racism for calling another Asian a "coconut". Here's Toube:

What finally caused his sacking was that he made the mistake of calling Sunny from Pickled Politics a “coconut”. That’s right, a racist comment directed at a “brown person”, and the Guardian finally recognised as the mark of a bigot and a loon.

Hold up. A "brown person" calling a "brown person" a coconut is racist? Against which community? the coconut community? Again it's Toube being a racist and a fool and one who glories in someone with whom he disagrees losing their job. A "coconut" is a put-down that non-whites call non-whites who are believed to have sold out to whites or internalised too much in the way of white or western establishment values. I don't know the context in which the "coconut" jibe was used and, typically Toube doesn't say, but of itself it's not racist unless he is as precious about whites as he is about some Jews, armed ethnic cleansing ones. But he claimed that Bodi, a "brown person" was being racist against a "brown person". I'm filing this under the racist and buffoon heading but who knows? it could be the liar thing, it's so hard to tell.

The coconut thing was incidental to the main target of the post. Toube himself got this Iranian blogger sacked from Comment is free for saying that the Israeli flag has flown in Downing Street since Thatcher's day, that Israel effectively occupies Iraq and that American policy is directed from Tel Aviv. She's shrill, aggressive and silly but and she might be racist but again unless you do as pro and anti-Jewish racists do and conflate Israel with Jews, she hasn't actually posted anything that is racist. All Toube had to do here is write to the Cif editor and the woman was sacked and the editor thanked Toube. As it happens I'm surprised that such a silly person could get to post articles at Cif but they've had Hirsh and Atzmon, they may have even had Toube under his pseudonym, David t, so they're not proud.

I could go on and on, in fact I have gone on and on but I want to deal with the turncoat bit of the headline. Now anyone might change their mind about things over the years but Toube bullies and harasses people with whom he used to be in complete agreement. Tony Greenstein posted a copy of the slip that David Toube signed many years ago to support the following statement:

On 2 November 1917, the British Government issued the Balfour Declaration. This represented the first major victory for the Zionist project of transforming Palestine from a part of the Ottoman empire into a Jewish state - a project which came to fruition on 15 May 1948, with the proclamation of 'the establishment of the Jewish state in Palestine'.

As a result, the Palestinian people now live either under Israeli rule or in exile. Those in the territories occupied by Israel in 1967 (many of them refugees from areas occupied in 1948) live under continuing harsh military rule; those in the territories occupied in 1948 are second-class residents in a Jewish state, denied the rights and privileges accorded to those residents recognised by the state as Jews.

On 9 December 1987, the Palestinian people living under Israeli military occupation rose up against their oppressors. On 15 November 1988, the Palestine National Council declared the establishment of the independent state of Palestine. Two years on, the Intifada continues. it is now manifestly clear to everyone that the Israeli military occupation must end, and that the PLO is the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. Any pretence to the contrary is an obvious lie.

Meanwhile, the Israeli repression of the Palestinian people and their Intifada continues. Over 800 Palestinians (150 of them children) have been killed by the Israeli security forces or by settlers in the past two years. Many thousands more have been maimed, imprisoned without trial, had their homes destroyed or been expelled from their homeland.

Israel has become an armed camp, at war both with its neighbours and with its subject Palestinian population. In its operations in Africa, Asia and Latin America, Israel represents a major link in the world network of repressive and racist regimes. Its nuclear weapons capacity, developed in alliance with South Africa, is a danger to the entire Middle East, and to the whole world.

In spite of this, Jewish communities have been recruited by Israel as both support and justification for its activities. The historic sufferings of Jews, particularly the Nazi murder of six million European Jews, are held to justify Israel's existence and behaviour. Israel continues to present itself as acting in the name of the Jewish people in international affairs.

We, entitled to the privileges accorded under the Israeli Law of Return to Jews and their close relatives, declare our opposition to the state of Israel as a Jewish state and to the Zionist movement. We call on our fellow Jews and their close relatives to join us in making the following statement:

* the Palestinian people, at whose expense the state of Israel was established and continues to exist, have the right to return, to self-determination and to their independent state on Palestinian soil;

* the Palestine Liberation Organisation is the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people;

* the state of Israel does not represent all Jewish people, neither legally, morally nor in any other way;

* the Zionist structure of the state of Israel is at the heart of the racism and oppression against the Palestinian people, and should be dismantled.

Ah the PLO, those were the days. But back to the lying, racist, buffoonish, bullying turncoat. Obviously Toube was lying when he described himself as anti-zionist recently on the Socialist Unity blog. What else are we to make of this:

In the past, far Left anti-Zionism was a mix of Stalinist anti-semitism and class analysis. You also got the identity crisis of Greenstein-types thrown in, for good measure.

So which was Toube? A stalinist or an identity crisis type? If we have to choose between just those two, it would have to be the latter. But it is just possible that he was an earnest young man who found not just the "ethnic definition" of statehood offensive but also "how they got there" what with the imperial umbrella thrown up over a campaign of colonial settlement and ethnic cleansing. The racist laws too, that Toube tries to pass off as being like the UK's laws, might have offended him so much that he joined a call for Israel's dismantlement.

He's contemptible now but it might just be the case that he was quite a nice chap when he was young. But he crosses a line when he tells despicable lies to try to lose people their jobs, particularly when he has asked people who know his true id not to reveal it in case it causes him problems in his work.

What scum, what unbelievable (excuse the pun) scum!

Oh dear, now he can go and cry to some more people about the terrible islamofascisttrotskyist invective directed his innocent moderate "sensible centre" self, poor lamb. And I shouldn't be so personal about this anyway. That someone of his low moral character and poor intellect (I know he can memorise laws) and with such a hate-filled right wing agenda can get to write for the main Jewish community newspaper and for Comment is free, and have the latter's editor writing to thank him for helping him sack an angry Iranian, is a sign of the times where those who criticise the "war on terror" or Israel are more vulnerable to various assailants posing as victims than used to be the case.

On Livni and Israeli politics

2008-10-04T13:07:00.001+01:00

For all interested. I have an op-ed in Electronic Intifada this weekend:

Livni: the making of an Israeli "dove"

Let me quote from the end of it:

The "Palestinian state" that Livni supports, a series of carved and convoluted Bantustans surrounded by walls and checkpoints, is not a compromise, however flawed, between Israeli and Palestinian nationalisms. It is a compromise between the need of affluent Israelis for international economic integration and the economic dependence of poorer Jewish constituencies on the continuation of the occupation. Palestinian aspirations are not part of this arrangement at all. They are expected to merely erase themselves from their lexicon. But this is not going to happen.

Now, pugnacious as I am, I have to strongly disagree with myself. It isn't only concern for integration with the Western world that drives the "Zionist Left" to support Livni. There is the fact that the occupation is expensive, even if it is still much cheaper that the alternative. There is also the very important question of regional integration. The benefits to Palestinians need not satisfy many Palestinians, but they should satisfy Saudis and other Gulf city states enough to get Israelis on the action. And finally, let us not forget (I'm speaking to myself) that affluent Israelis want an agreement that will cost them nothing. Given the huge disparity of wealth between Israelis and Palestinians, that is a tall order, and paying Ethiopean and Russian Jews to stand at unsavory chekpoints is--how shell we put it politely--pareto efficient.

Wall-Street and Main-Street: A lost play by Beckett

2008-10-02T13:59:00.018+01:00

"Wall-Street" is a head of a man sunk up to his ears in banknotes. "Main-Street" is a double amputee walking on his elbows nearby. As the amputee passes by...

Main-Street: I lost my legs, I lost my house, I lost my job, have mercy on an old soldier. Do you have a dime for an old soldier?

Wall-Street: Hey there, stop, give me 700 billion dollars or else...

M: What the fuck?

W: Give me 700 billion dollars or else...

M: Or else what, dickhead?

W: if you don't give me the money, I won't lend it to you back at interest. And you'll freeze to death.

M: You're fucking hallucinating. Look at me. If I had 700 billion dollars , I'd treat myself to something better than this, wouldn't I?

W: give me 700 billion dollars. That's your only hope.

M: Man you're so thick. I don't have any fucking 700 dimes for chrissake!

W: Oh crap! You're the people. Just make it up. What is money anyway? A note with a number scribbled on it.

M: Then why don't you make the money up?

W: Only the people can do it.

M: Ah?

W: Because you can impose taxes and force people to pay or else...

M: But you're forcing me to pay, what's the fucking difference?

W: I'm asking you to pay, or else you'll die freezing in the cold. That's all the difference in the world.

M: Well, fuck you! I'm giving you nothing.

W: Well of course it is up to you. But with the money I'll lend you, you could be buying yourself a burger or something, take a bath. Think about it.

M: Why can't I take the money I make up and just buy me a fucking burger without paying you a fucking interest?

W: Because you won't know how to allocate it correctly. You'll blow it, spend it on stupid things, bridges to nowhere, welfare checks for fake cripples that just wouldn't put an honest day's work, leeches, thieves.... Money takes smarts, economics, good models, correct structures of incentives, multipliers, tough investment decisions. You need professionals; you need entrepreneurs. People who understand money. People who have money and can be trusted to make the right decisions about money because it is their money.

M: But you just blew everything up?

W: If we can sometimes allocate capital badly, imagine what would have happened if people like you were in charge of it.

M: Do you mind if I take one dollar from this pile, buy me something to eat?

W: hands off you lazy bum! This is my hard earned money!!

Sarah Silverman's satirical racism, it's good for Jews!

2008-10-02T08:10:00.006+01:00

See what you think of this.

The Great Schlep from The Great Schlep on Vimeo.

I had a little emailed discussion with the person who sent me the link to this Great Schlep site about how this "satirising" of racism can actually be a cover for racism in its own right. I'd never heard of this Sarah Silverman until last night though I did read something about the ludicrous idea of Jews cajoling their grandparents into voting for Obama even though he's black because he supports various causes that Jews also support and he's NOT, just NOT, Muslim or Arab. Now that last point is something Obama himself said would make him a "pretty scary guy" as we know from his sycophantic homage to AIPAC happily hosted by the group funding the Great Schlep, the Jewish Council for Education & Research.

My correspondent and I agreed that this site and skit is racist in many ways, against Jews, in particular old ones but also the young ones who are held to be typified by this Sarah Silverman character, African-Americans who are likened to old Jews on account of their common concerns, Arabs and Muslims because the idea that Obama might be either is vigorously denied by this young liberal princess and of course elderly Jews are being told that they should vote Obama because he's good for the racist war criminals of the Sate of Israel.

This Sarah Silverman wants to be Lenni Bruce but she comes across as Joan Rivers meets Joan Peters. Jon Stewart still has the edge on video clips on Obama. Take a tip here Sarah.

*
Jon Stewart has his flaws of course, but he's streets ahead on Obama.

*Hmm? The embed of the Daily Show isn't showing here, not to me anyway, but it is showing here. Dunno what that's all about. A blogger glitch perhaps, a Firefox thing? Dunno. Sorry but check out Stewart, Jon not Martha, he's much better.

JSF to the Ummah: Eid Mubarak!

2008-09-30T23:57:00.004+01:00

This marks only the second year since 9/11 that my hometown has lit up its remaining tallest building green for Eid.

Everyone remembers the CNN film of a few Palestinians dancing in E. Jerusalem on 9/11. I recall watching that & feeling more than a little irked, having just come from a candlelight vigil with the WTC smoldering in the background & spending part of the day standing on line to donate blood for the wounded -- who never materialized -- that anyone could find a reason to rejoice in the pointless destruction of my city.

Fifteen months later I traveled to Palestine for the first time. In January of '03, I witnessed the biggest single-day orgy of home demolition in the West Bank since the beginning of the occupation, in the village of Nazlat Issa. Nazlat Issa was a thriving commercial center in the northern West Bank that straddled the Green Line. At least 60 shops were destroyed by the IDF that day. After the major part of the destruction was done, I was coughing amidst the rubble, something easily set off since the weeks I'd spent breathing in the debris of 9/11, and that caught the attention of a local pharmacist. He advised me to drink water, and regretted he didn't have anything from his shop to give me, as it had just been flattened.

Quite all right, I assured him, and when I explained the origin of my cough, I got a very common reaction from him, the one most Palestinians expressed as soon as they'd find out I was from New York -- deep sadness for what my city had gone through. Now I was savvy enough not to have expected to find a troupe of 9-11 celebrants prancing about the West Bank, but I was still quite moved at this widely-expressed commiseration. After all, my co-religionists, many of them being settlers with Brooklyn accents, were busy ethnically cleansing these folks, and my country was financing it. But it really took the cake, this pharmacist standing in the rubble of everything he had, and there he was busying himself expressing effusive sorrow for MY loss & worrying about my cough.

Caked with mud as we all were, and wanting to get away from the dust and the terminator-like machines still ripping away at the remains of the buildings, the pharmacist took myself and two other US Jewish activists to his family's house. He was a superb host, even on such a lousy day, occasionally getting a bit sunken when he talked about how he didn't know how he was going to support his family or mused on what would become of his village. But he brightened up considerably when one of my compatriots surged off an overstuffed sofa and burst into a fabulous interpretation of a Shakira-style bump & grind while the chanteuse blared over Lebanese MTV. We merrily egged him on, clapping in unison, and the one female activist amongst us gamely attempted to ululate. The pharmacist's mother made me tea with an herb picked from their garden -- worked wonders on the throat.

So the picture above is in appreciation for that fellow -- I hope he & his family are doing well this Eid; him and all the other Palestinians who've plied me with their hospitality, wisdom, humor & forbearance in my too brief visits to their beleaguered & beautiful homeland.

Fun with Finkelstein

2008-09-30T17:09:00.002+01:00

Many thanks to Roland Rance for posting the link to this Finkelstein interview to the Just Peace UK list. I must say Finkelstein's on cracking form here. Here are a few, quite a few, cuts:

In 2007, Finkelstein was denied tenure at DePaul University because of an intimidation campaign spearheaded by Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, whose book, The Case for Israel, was pilloried by Finkelstein as blatant plagiarism of an earlier work, Joan Peters' From Time Immemorial, which was itself long ago exposed as a hoax.

That's an opener by the interviewer. And here's the man on Fatah:

I don't get involved in internal Palestinian politics. Those are choices Palestinians have to make. This much however can be said. You cannot win from diplomacy what you haven't won on the battlefield. I don't necessarily mean an exchange of lethal weapons; mobilizing public opinion is also a potent force. A good versus a bad diplomat will make some difference. Abba Eban made some difference; I don't want to discount it. But negotiations are the most trivial aspect of politics. What counts in politics is your ability to organize, mobilize, and bring to bear superior force -- and again force doesn't necessarily mean lethal force; there is also the force of public opinion. The so-called Palestinian leadership has not invested any time in trying to organize its constituency either in the Occupied Territories or abroad. Nothing is going to change without such organization -- it's just silliness; for the Palestinian leadership, lucrative silliness.

Whereas:

Hezbollah organized. Hezbollah prepared. Hezbollah analyzed and understood its enemy. Its judgment was not 100% accurate, but certainly that's where it invested its energy, with very impressive results. When you read detailed accounts of the 2006 Lebanon war, you realize just how astonishing was its defeat of the Israeli military. Hezbollah fired about 5,000 missiles altogether at Israel or in Lebanon (anti-tank missiles); Israel delivered or fired 162,000 weapons at Lebanon (about 4,800 per day). Israel fielded about 30,000 troops; Hezbollah's fighters numbered about 2,000 and there were about 4,000 village militia. Israel never even faced the crack Hezbollah forces which were stationed on the Litani waiting for an Israeli invasion that never happened.

And the Arab regimes?

Why should one expect more from the Saudis? The Arab regimes are completely in thrall to the United States. They would of course prefer to settle the Israel-Palestine conflict in terms of the international consensus. The Arab League has repeatedly put forth perfectly reasonable proposals to end the conflict in line with the whole of the international community. But they are not going to do more than express a preference. They're unpopular, corrupt, and therefore dependent on the United States.

On zionism, the Israel lobby and the democratic deficit:

You have to make a distinction between the popular level and the electoral level. At the popular level it's quite a big difference now as compared to say a decade ago in terms of the ability to criticize Israeli policy and to reach people. It's not difficult at all now on the popular level. If you have public meetings and so forth there's a very receptive, or potentially receptive, audience out there. Jimmy Carter's book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid showed this. The Israel lobby called him an anti-Semite, Holocaust-denier, supporter of Nazis and supporter of terrorism. His book still wound up at the top of the bestseller list. But the electoral level is not just about votes, it's crucially also about money; those with lots of money get a better hearing. At the electoral level it remains quite difficult. We haven't yet been able to translate popular feeling into an electoral mandate. That's not unusual. You have in the United States, for example, overwhelming popular support for gun control. But at the electoral level, because of a well-organized lobby, you're not able to translate the popular feeling into an electoral mandate. That's also true of health care and myriad other issues.......

There is much misunderstanding about the scope and reach of the Israeli lobby. In my opinion the Israel lobby has a significant impact on U.S. policy in the Israel-Palestine conflict. U.S. elites do not derive any advantage from the occupation; they would be perfectly happy if tomorrow Israel announced that it accepts the international consensus and will withdraw to the June 1967 borders. The reason U.S. elites don't press harder for such a settlement is the lobby.

But when we come to broad regional issues such as Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, it's not the lobby that's the driving force. It's U.S. policy. You can say U.S. policy is misguided and you can say that once U.S. policy has been decided, the lobby plays a useful role in drumming up public support. But the notion that somehow Cheney and Rumsfeld were duped or coerced by the lobby into waging a war in Iraq contrary to the U.S. "national interest" is neither on its face credible nor supported by the available documentary record.

On Dershowitz, possibly the best part. Here's the interviewer:

for instance, in one case, Alan Dershowitz chopped up a quote to claim you called your mother a Nazi collaborator. How do you deal with that kind of stuff?

And here's Finkelstein again:

My mother was very solicitous about my health and safety. She was a Jewish mother. But what Dershowitz said crossed the line. It's hard to fathom the magnitude of that slander: to say that somebody who passed through the Nazi holocaust, and every single member of her family was exterminated, and her entire life, from the day she was "liberated" till her death, she grieved over the loss of her family -- that now some sick sack of shit would come along, after her death and when she is no longer around to defend herself, and proclaim that my mother collaborated -- or I believe she collaborated -- with the murderers of her family. . .

So it did require immense self-control -- or maybe you want to call it cowardice -- for me to do nothing about it.

Dershowitz got very bad PR when he threatened a libel suit against the University of California press for publishing my book Beyond Chutzpah. He was trying to get a rise out of me so I would sue him for libel. Then he could say, "You see! Who's suing whom for libel now?" He was trying to push me into a corner or provoke me sufficiently that I would, like a panther -- which is how the Black Panther [Party] got its name -- you keep pushing it back and back and back, and it retreats and retreats and retreats, and finally when it's in a corner, it leaps out at you....

There's no "intellectual" battle with Dershowitz. On his part there's no summoning of facts or elegant use of logic. It's just bar mitzvah speeches. He doesn't know anything, I doubt if he's read more than a half-dozen books on the topic. I don't entirely fault him. You can't defend high profile spousal murderers like O.J. Simpson, high profile sexual predators like Jeffrey Epstein, and high profile mass murderers like Radovan Karadzic, yet still have time left over to do serious scholarship. What he does is entertainment; it's a circus. He's like Hitchens. No one really cares about the facts Hitchens brings to bear. He could be making one case today and the opposite case tomorrow. Would anybody notice? They're just interested in the rococo tapestry he weaves around the facts. You don't walk away saying, "I've learned X, Y or Z from Hitchens," you walk away saying, "Wasn't that a witty line? Wasn't that a clever repartee?"

It's the same thing with Dershowitz -- of course, Dershowitz is not witty or clever. You don't learn anything and you don't expect to. I live near Coney Island. It's like the popular sideshow "Shoot the Freak." I haven't read a journal of intellectual opinion in years. Gandhi's collected works come to 90 volumes. Most of it consists of letters, quite a few on diet. There's more moral seriousness in one Gandhi letter to an anonymous correspondent on treating constipation than nearly the whole of our intellectual life.....

Everybody is terrified of Dershowitz because he wields a lot of power and is a very vindictive little man. I wasn't afraid and, I think, did a pretty solid job of demonstrating he is a preposterous charlatan. So he got his revenge by driving me out of academia, although -- in his mind -- not enough to compensate for the damage I did to his name.

And finally, about the interviewer:

Junaid Levesque-Alam is a Pakistani-American who blogs about America and Islam at Crossing the Crescent (www.crossingthecrescent.com). He writes about American Muslim identity for WireTap magazine and has been published in CounterPunch, Dissident Voice, The Nation (online), and The American Muslim. He works as a communications coordinator for an anti-domestic violence agency in the NYC area and obtained his undergraduate degree in journalism from Northeastern University. He can be reached at: junaidalam1 AT gmail.com.

Happy New Jewish Year

2008-09-29T18:55:00.004+01:00

Happy Rosh Hashana, dear readers of JSF. May you all have a sweet year!

I hate to spoil your holiday fun, but many leaders of the Jewish community are alarmed that assimilation is leading Jews away from their roots. So many Jews no longer celebrate Rosh Hashana or even know that today is Rosh Hashana.

But fear not! Israel is the solution to assimilation.

For every Jew who no longer celebrates the high holidays, there is a Palestinian who is forced to celebrate them whether he or she wants to or not:

A general closure will be imposed on the West Bank, commencing Sunday night at midnight, in accordance with Defense Ministry directives and in light of security assessments, the army said.

The closure will be lifted at midnight Wednesday, after Rosh Hashana.

For the duration of the closure, the passage of those in need of humanitarian and medical aid will be authorized by the District Coordination and Liaison offices, said the IDF.

The army announced that since it regards Rosh Hashana as a highly sensitive time, it would increase its alert level in order to ensure the safety of Israeli citizens, while preserving, to the best of its ability, the daily life of the Palestinians.
(Jerusalem Post, 28 Sept, 2008)

Doesn't it warm your heart that the Jewish holidays are celebrated by four million people, whether they like it or not, with enforced imprisonment, travel bans, and other traditional customs Jews brought with them from their European homelands!

'Thinking Palestine' booklaunch

2008-09-29T14:09:00.004+01:00

This should be of interest to people in London. There's a booklaunch of a new collection of essays on Palestine in SOAS this Wednesday, October 1st. Anyone interested is cordially welcome. Ilan Pappe and Ronit Lentin will be speaking; the book is called 'Thinking Palestine' and is edited by Dr. Lentin.

Should be an interesting evening (disclosure: one of my articles - on study trips to Palestine - is in the book) and it kicks off at at 7 pm. The exact address is The Khalili Lecture Theatre SOAS, University of London, Russell Square, London WC1.

For a review of the book: http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9743.shtml

Israel capable of first strike on Iran?

2008-09-29T08:07:00.003+01:00

This is bad news. According to this Guardian report

The US has supplied Israel with a powerful long-range radar system that would provide an extra early warning in case of an Iranian missile attack, it was confirmed yesterday.

The bad news is that this means that Israel can launch a missile attack on Iran and avoid direct retaliation though of course there could be indirect means of retaliation.

Reading the article, America is claiming that it is a warning against Iran and a calming device for Israel. The curious thing about America's reasoning is that intrinsically defensive weaponry, like say, anti-ballistic missiles, have always been seen as actually offensive because they enable a first strike capability and they were the first to go in American-Soviet strategic arms limitation treaties. Also, Israel is nearly always responsibly for first strikes in its wars against its natives and neighbours whereas Iran has never attacked any of its neighbours. Further, Iran has said that it will not attack Israel whereas Israel has threatened Iran. And of course if Israel was to deny any aggressive intent towards Iran, what would that mean given Israel's appalling record of dishonesty?

America is going to be controlling the system it's giving to Israel and it's claimed that Israel isn't getting the green light to attack Iran but if Israel attacks Iran and Iran tries to retaliate, will the Americans implementing the project sit still while Iranian missiles hurtle towards them?

I can't help thinking I've got something wrong here. I hope I have.

Mufti "shameful" but not important

2008-09-28T20:51:00.005+01:00

Here's a review in the New York Times by Tom Segev of a book on the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem by David Dalin and John Rothmann. Tom Segev describes it as a classic of the Arab-bashing genre and concludes that the book is, horror of horrors, bad for Israel.

Here are some snippets. This is the opener:

In August 1968, two American college students, David Dalin and John Rothmann, visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. There they saw an enlarged photograph of Hitler with Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Palestinian leader and grand mufti of Jerusalem. “We were immediately struck by the same question,” they recount in the preface to this book: “What was the story behind that photo?”

These guys spent forty years wondering how they could spin one photo to Israel's advantage. Over that time there have been many books about the holocaust and the zionist approach to the rise of Hitler and there have been exposés of some bogus histories of the Jews and the holocaust. And doesn't whoever runs Yad Vashem (aka the holocaust circus) know it?

in recent years the photo they saw has been reduced in scale and removed to its proper historical context (a section in the museum that deals with volunteers from several nations who enlisted in Hitler’s Waffen SS)

Perhaps our intrepid scholars never went back to the circus because

“Ever since that August day in Jerusalem 40 years ago, we have pursued the story of the mufti with relentless determination, devoting innumerable hours to researching his life and times,” they write. The result, “Icon of Evil,” is of little scholarly value

But that won't stop it being a commercial success and it won't harm the careers of the authors, I'm sure.

Segev offers a somewhat dispassionate description of the Mufti:

In accordance with the principle of my enemy’s enemy is my ally, the mufti sought support from Nazi Germany and in return backed Hitler’s war, including the extermination of the Jews. In addition to meeting with Hitler, he sat down with Adolf Eichmann and sabotaged a plan to transfer Jewish children from Eastern Europe to Palestine.

All this was wrong and shameful, but in contrast to the authors’ contention, one can question whether Husseini “played an important role” in the Holocaust.

Zionists love to yabber on about the Mufti as if he took the whole of the Palestinian people with him to join the Waffen SS. They should be careful, as Segev notes,

The mufti’s support for Nazi Germany definitely demonstrated the evils of extremist nationalism. However, the Arabs were not the only chauvinists in Palestine looking to make a deal with the Nazis. At the end of 1940 and again at the end of 1941, a small Zionist terrorist organization known as the Stern Gang made contact with Nazi representatives in Beirut, seeking support for its struggle against the British. One of the Sternists, in a British jail at the time, was Yitzhak Shamir, a future Israeli prime minister. The authors fail to mention this episode.

There's another issue that ties this book to the zionist genre:

Throughout the book, Dalin and Rothmann tend to blur the terms radical Islam, anti-Semitism and Nazism

It's funny how zionists never baulk at that kind of trivialising of the holocaust and then there's

and numerous Arab and Muslim leaders are grouped together as disciples of the mufti. Anwar Sadat and Yasir Arafat are among the villains, though one is left to guess in what way the mufti’s spell led them to strike historic deals with Israel.

Hmm, there I have to part company with Segev. Maybe it was the influence of a nazi collaborator that set Sadat and Arafat on the road to compromising with Israel. I actually read somewhere that in the 1960s, seven Egyptian generals were asked what they thought of Hitler. 5 refused to answer, one said he was no good and the other admired him. I can't remember where I read that but that last was Sadat.

Anyway, I'll end where I began, with Segev's conclusion:

the book is worth noticing, as it belongs to a genre of popular Arab-bashing that is often believed to be “good for Israel.” It is not. The suggestion that Israel’s enemies are Nazis, or the Nazis’ heirs, is apt to discourage any fair compromise with the Palestinians, and that is bad for Israel.

Ok, it costs $26 and it's "bad for Israel". Go on!! Get out there and buy that book, not that I'm going to.

Israel: a "lawful state"?

2008-09-26T08:28:00.003+01:00

I suppose the big news is that it appears that an extreme settler group has tried to kill Peace Now activist and Haaretz columnist Professor Ze'ev Sternhell.

Police suspect Jewish extremists of having carried out the pipe bomb attack earlier in the day.

But the thing I want to focus on is the bizarre comment made by Tzipi Livni following the bomb attack:

At a ceremony marking the Rosh Hashanah holiday at the Foreign Ministry, Livni went on to say that "the state of Israel is a lawful state, and moreover, it is populated by a society with values. It is the responsibility of the government and the Israeli society to renounce such phenomena as soon as the rear their heads."

Isn't that bizarre? Isn't it strange a leader saying that a state is "lawful". Most leaders take such things for granted. I can only guess as to why she would say such a strange thing but I think it has to do with that fact that the State of Israel is nothing like lawful. It's just something I noticed, that's all.

Thank God Lev Leviev is not motivated by Racism!

2008-09-20T20:04:00.013+01:00

If Lev Leviev did not exist, Charles Dickens would have invented him. But as far as conjuring ugliness is concerned, Dickens is no match to reality.

There is apparently no misery that Leviev cannot turn into additional zeroes to his net worth. He makes money from the mining of diamond in Angola under conditions not far from slavery. There his company assets are "protected" with murder and sexual torture (Rafael Marques, lecture at St Antony’s College, Jan 26 2007 ). In the West Bank, his companies build settlements on stolen land and participate in the destruction of Palestinian villages such as Jayyous and Bil'in. Opression for Leviev is just another name for a business opportunity.

He is also a Jewish chauvinist who supports right-wing religious organizations such as Chabad and helps them spread their message of hate across the world.

All this leads to a fascinating question. What comes first for Leviev, the egg of racism or the chicken of profits?

We are interested in this question because in the general culture we live in, profits are kosher, whereas racism is a bit like dirty underwear, common enough but not to be shown in public. If it can be established that although Leviev invests in settlements he only really cares about money, some people might think better of him. We on the other hand think it is important to understand how profits depend on and require racism.

Concerned as we are with his damaged reputation, we are happy to report that Leviev's entrepreneurial portfolio proves he is more than willing to make money from the misery and oppression of Jews as much as from that of Palestinians and Angolans.

First, there is the interesting fact that Leviev's schools in Israel are implicated in their own racist scandal involving Ethiopian Jews. Then there is the complex economic nexus of the settlements Leviev builds. The demand for "development," on which Leviev's profits depend, is generated by government policies officially motivated by zionist fervor. But behind that fervor is a new economy that uses economic misery in a very old fashioned way. In Leviev-built settlements like Modi'in Ilit, high tech companies like Oracle, Matrix (a subsidiary of Formula Systems) and others compete on the fabled global marketplace by paying ultra-orthodox Jewish women between $275 and $1000 a month for writing java and dot.net code. The women work in hi-tech sweatshops where they are not allowed to talk with each other. And the company Rabbi forbids taking a 5 minute break for prayer on company time. (Gadi Alghazi, New Left Review 40, 2006)

Then, there is Leviev's company Africa-Israel, which is working towards the grand opening of Israel's first private prison. This first prison is a modest affair, less than a thousands inmates. But if the court bid to stop Leviev fails, it is already clear that a stay at Leviev's Hotel California will cost more than the public facilities it replaces. The Prison-Industrial Complex not being a new thing, we can be sure that Leviev will make money from his Israeli prison by following the U.S. model of providing inhuman conditions to his captive audience. No doubt also that given the ease with which Israeli politicians are bought, private prisons will create irresistable temptations to cut back even more on those social services that help people stay out of jail (although that would be hard given than 30% of schoochildren in Israel who began the scholarly year this month already suffer from hunger!)

We would like however to make two modest proposals.

First, we hope Susan Sarandon will grace the grand opening of the first Israeli private prison with the presence of her beautiful persona. After all, there are arguments on both sides, and there is nothing like such a gesture on her behalf to prove that the reason she wouldn't condemn Leviev has nothing to do with cowardice and fear of being associated with the too unpopular cause of justice for Palestinians.

Second, we note that there aren't enough Israelis to guarantee the kind of profits that would really make Leviev smile. Even if Israel's incarceration rates reached U.S. levels, and even if Leviev operated every prison cell in Israel, his profit would be less than $400 million dollars a year from this venture. Realistically, Leviev can expect to put his paws on no more than 10% of that. $40 million isn't chump change at all. But surely a world class entrepreuneur like Leviev can do better. Why stop at these retail prisons when the "international community's" plan for "peace" in the Middle East includes putting four million Palestinans in four open air prisons. Now there's a business opportunity of a century! Go for it Leviev! Nobody else is up to the challenge.

Dancing with racists

2008-09-19T17:45:00.003+01:00

Alvin Ailey Dance Company went to Israel this last month, ignoring the Palestinian Boycott call. Sad as it is, the full ironies of this story are even sadder.

The dance company, founded in 1958, was Ailey's response to his own experience of white racism in the U.S. and Ailey's work has always been politically conscious. As Ailey said "If you live in the elite world of dance, you find yourself in a world rife with racism." But part of the contradictions of struggling against racism through cultural work is that success requires accommodations and finding ways to both challenge and serve racism at the same time. Ailey's company was for example one of the first group that toured South East Asia on State Department funds, thus helping U.S. imperialism in the very beginning of the U.S. engagement in Vietnam. It would be surprising if Ailey's mental illness, self-medication and premature death were unconnected with the stress of dealing with racism and succeeding under its terms.

As if to answer the unvoiced (or at least unreported) question "why perform here?" Judith Jamison, Alvey's successor at the helm, told the Israeli press:

"We are artists and will always be in your face, no matter what....We are here to irritate you, to change your mind and make you think." (Haaretz, Sept. 17, 2008)

Unfortunately, this is an example of bad faith. The reason why the dance company is in Israel is because it pays. The transaction goes like this. The spectators pay the artist for mild provocations that make them "think," i.e. consider universal problems such as mortality, love, and even racism, but in "complex", "irresolvable" ways. The artist provides the audience an affirmation of the latter's class and cultural superiority which is evident in the latter's enlightened willingness to be so irritated, all the while allowing them not to think about all those "problems" whose improvement might require real sacrifice from them. Problems such as....the apartheid system that pays for these refined pleasures in Tel Aviv.

There are of course opportunities for artists to break the limits of these transactions. But these require some more serious thought than Jamison is ready to entertain. What, for example, would it mean to make the audience think, when the audience is composed of those most benefiting from Israeli Apartheid? At least, in order to change someone's mind one needs a specific intention. How can you change someone's mind when you can't even express what it is that you want to convey? Had she been serious, Jamison could have for example told the audience she'll perform in Tel Aviv when half of the people in the hall would be Palestinians from Nablus and Dheishe. Alas, that would provoke the kind of irritating thinking that audiences boo.

In a final twist of irony, a dancer from the company with a Muslim name was taken aside while checking to fly out of Ben-Gurion Airport. The security personnel thought nothing of asking the dancer to dance for them to prove his or her story. Take a moment to imagine this utterly offensive scene.

The officer wanted to know that the dancer was "really a dancer" and not the "security threat" reflected in the name and skin color. Had the security officer belonged to the same social class as Tel Aviv's dance afficionados, that extra dance at the airport would have been superfluous.

UPDATE: Omar Barghuoti knows more about the story than I and his article corrects a few factual errors in the post above.

Denouncing Israel kills!!!

2008-09-17T21:50:00.003+01:00

Eh? What? Who could say such a ludicrous, nay more, nutty thing? Yup, it's our own nutty professor, or at least he would be a nutty professor if he was a professor* at all, Dr David Hirsh. So what's this latest attempt at silencing criticism of Israel all about?

Paul McCartney is to play a gig (maybe more) in Israel and he has been asked not to by the Palestinian Campaign for an Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. Well apparently some of the papers have got hold of an islamist rent-a-quote's threat to kill McCartney and according to Dr Hirsh it's all PACBI's fault because of their "politics of denunciation". See this:

PACBI should understand what it means to denounce a person as a collaborator with "Israeli apartheid". If you play the politics of denunciation, somebody is likely to take you seriously and for that, you have to take some political responsibility.

But no, I'm wrong and I'm being unfair. I'm just having a little bit of fun at the expense of "frightened Jews". Dr Hirsh isn't for one minute saying it is all PACBI's fault. It's the fault of the Universities and Colleges Union as well because look:

The University and College Union, which talks the talk in favour of the exclusion of Israelis from the academic, cultural, sporting and economic life of humanity needs to understand that its denunciations may have consequences. Just because the political children of the boycott campaign are used to nobody taking what they say seriously, they should not rely on it.

Official policy of the UCU "notes" the "apparent complicity of most of the Israeli academy" in "illegal settlement, killing of civilians" and other human rights abuses.

You gotta love the line about people not taking the UCU seriously. He's such a shrewd debater. Point out that the whole of the zionist movement has upped its resource deployment by millions of pounds to combat the academic boycott in the UK alone and Hirsh can say, aha, "so they are inciting murder" or say "ok, no one takes the boycotters seriously" and bear the shame of agreeing with Hirsh.

Hirsh is an intellectual shadow of John Strawson (as in poor imitation not carbon copy) and Strawson has tried this incitement to murder tosh on Joseph Massad before now so there's an element of party line to this hysteria. Campaign against Israel's racist structure or the occupation in a meaningful way and you will be accused of inciting murder.

And of course no post by Dr Hirsh would be complete without a misrepresentation of what his targets have actually said. See this:

McCartney is not "effectively complicit" in "racial oppression". It is just rubbish. And it is also dangerous and irresponsible rubbish.

And what did the PACBI statement that led to Hirsh accusing them of responsibility in the event of McCartney being killed actually say?Despite our denunciation of Paul McCartney's effective complicity in covering up Israel's occupation and system of racial oppression, ... PACBI strongly and unequivocally condemns any violent threats made against him or, for that matter, against any other cultural or academic figure who decides to visit Israel in violation of the Palestinian boycott of Israel.
Complicity in the covering up of racial oppression. And that is without getting into their strong and unequivocal condemnation of any violence against McCartney or anyone else who scabs on the boycott.

Oh no! I've looked at the comments and Ben White has queried Hirsh's use of quotation marks around the expression "collaborator with apartheid". In some ways I wish he hadn't have done that because now the Engage troll army is mobilised in making the word collaborator mean one who is complicit. But Hirsh was offering what clearly purported to be a quote. Curiouser still, the shadowy Shachtman (who I've always suspected of being a Hirsh sock puppet) has popped up with some copied and pasted letters from PACBI again running this line that people who entertain in Israel are participating in the covering up of Israel's oppressive state structure and behaviour, not collaborating with the oppression itself.

But Ben White's question has remained unanswered by either Hirsh or Shachtman. Here it is:

Is it possible to provide some examples where either Paul McCartney or others who PACBI have included in their boycott campaign have actually been called "collaborators with apartheid"?

Amid twenty-five comments (so far) accusing Ben of illiteracy (or something close) or obsessiveness he's forced to respond to his own question thus:

The thing is, when you use quotation marks, it's usually because you're quoting someone. However, as we've seen, the phrase "collaborator with apartheid" is a Hirsh interpretation. That is important, of course, because of the specific mileage Hirsh then tries to get out of the term 'collaborator'. So thanks 'Shachtman' (ahem) and Brian, but the impression of rather tenuous logic still lingers...But then Hirsh often seems to see what he'd like, rather than what's there, like the recent case of the vanishing 'solidarity' headline.

'Solidarity' headline, what 'solidarity' headline?

*What the Americans call a professor is called a lecturer in the UK. Professor in the UK is something more grand.

Anti-Semitism in the Scottish Sunday Herald

2008-09-16T00:15:00.007+01:00

The Israeli navy, like any navy, does bad things. Unarmed Palestinian fishermen, like all unarmed fishermen, do bad things too. So why is the Scottish Sunday Herald singling out the Israeli navy for shooting at unarmed Palestinian fishermen? Why isn't it devoting column space to when the Chinese navy shoots unarmed Tibetan fisherman? Or when Arab Sudanese nautical militia shoot at unarmed African Darfurian fishermen? By only showing videos of Israeli seamen shooting up Palestinian boats, what they are really doing is exploiting the subtext that "The Jews" -- because the Israeli navy happens to be populated largely with Jews (some of them likely Zionist Israeli Jews) -- are shooting at defenseless Palestinians, seemingly for no reason. It even claims that 14 Palestinian fishermen have died this way. It fails to mention how many Israeli seamen have been killed by unarmed Palestinian fishermen. Thus, they wittingly spread the "naval libel," that Jews shoot Palestinian fishermen for fun. Shame on the Herald. Good on the Israeli embassy for refusing to dignify this Jew-baiting with a comment.

Here the ISM claims the Israeli navy rammed a Palestinian fishing vessel.
The ISM claims the navy yelled over a megaphone, "When the internationals leave Gaza, you will all be made to pay."

UPDATE: from an ISM press release, Sept. 16:

An Italian solidarity activist who sailed into Gaza has been injured today by the Israeli Navy while he was accompanying fishermen in Gaza.

Vittorio Arrigoni was hit by flying glass as the Israeli navy used a high power water cannon against the unarmed boats. The water canon smashed the glass surrounding the steering section of the boat, with shards lacerating Vittorio's back. He was been taken to hospital immediately upon reaching shore, requiring stitches.