Islamophobes are Insane

Despite the fact that I have some critical views about Islam myself, I continue to hold that the Islamophobes of the world are insane. They make no sense at all. Another commenter noted recently that the Hindutvadis of India (really nearly all middle to upper class high caste Hindus) have a hatred of Islam that makes no sense whatsoever and is completely irrational. I would agree with that. The Hindutvadi commenters on this blog have a truly irrational hatred of Islam.

To some extent it is true that Islam is a menace, and it is a violent religion, but it’s mostly a problem in the various sandboxes that are ruled by Islam. In other words, Islam is mostly a problem for Muslims and not for the rest of us. To the extent that it is a problem for the rest of is is mostly due to the fact that we can’t seem to stop attacking and killing Muslims. As long as we do that, they will wage defense or revenge based Islam on us.

The truth is that that most Islamophobes are motivated by reaction. There are very few progressive Islam-haters (there are some in Afghanistan and Iran) because Islamophobia is not a progressive value.

Almost all Islamophobes in the West are motivated by political reaction. In other words, they are beasts themselves – they are the very beasts that they accuse the Muslims of being. In Europe, Islamophobes are associated with the most reactionary elements of Europe – European and even White nationalists. They are also associated with all of the fascist and quasi-fascist parties in Europe.

They are strongly aligned with Zionism, a vile imperialist and settler-colonial fascist project that occupies and conquers Arab lands and has expansionist aims on the rest of it.They are politically reactionary, and many of them have begun to rail against socialism and the welfare state and have started to rail for radical neoliberal economics. In the UK, they are responsible for Crusade-like invasions of Muslim lands in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan.

In Russia it is much the same, except the Islam-haters are even worse – more racist, more fascist and much more violent. They are associated with a violent project to deny the majority-Muslim lands in the Caucasus their right to self-determination, which is their inherent right after all. Instead, like Crusaders of recent European colonizers, the Russians have made much of the Caucasus into colonies. In the meantime, they committed genocide against the Muslims of Chechnya.

In Israel, the Islamophobes are associated with the most fascist,  backwards, conquering and expansionist elements of the Jews. I should note that these same elements hate Christians and non-Jews about as much as they hate Islam. These are the monsters of the Jewish people, as wicked as they accuse the Muslims of being. This group is also politically reactionary, and is responsible for imposing radical neoliberalism on Israel which has resulted in many social problems, including widespread homelessness.

In Lebanon, the Muslim haters are associated with the Maronite Christian Falangist movement, a true fascist movement that has the distinction of being the first movement to bring European style fascism (like the Nazis) to Lebanon. The founders of this movement worshiped Hitler. This is a true monstrosity, a blood and soil fascist movement that has deep roots in Maronite society. In addition, this group is politically reactionary, supporting the closest thing to radical neoliberalism anywhere in the Arab World.

In India, the Muslim haters are the most poisonous, backwards, fascistic and casteist elements of Indian society, strongly associated with the high caste Hindu elite. There is a lot of evidence that the hatred of Islam by Hindutvadis is because the Muslims humiliated the high castes and removed them from their position of privilege in Hindu society. This is an extremely fascist movement whose leaders also worshiped Hitler. They are responsible for a genocide against Muslims in Gujarat in which 2,500 Muslims were slaughtered with state support.

This movement is associated also with radical neoliberal economics and hatred for socialism and the poor and lower castes of India. It is an elite movement designed to deepen poverty in India, enrich the high castes and restore the high castes to their position of privilege which they felt was denied them in a movement since Independence. They represent the most primitive and barbaric elements of Hindu culture, which is backwards, cruel, amoral  and parasitic anyway. These are the monsters of India and the monsters of the world, a danger to the SubCon and to the rest of us as they spread out like a plague around the globe. They are every bit as vicious and monstrous as the Muslims they hate so much.

The bottom line is that Islamophobes are simply bad people.

Everywhere it exists on Earth, it is associated with idiotic and barbaric religious fundamentalism, either Jewish, Christian or Hindu. It is generally associated with the most reactionary elements in every society, and it usually wishes to impose radical rightwing economics on society in the form of neoliberalism.

This is an elite project designed to enrich the top 20% of society while impoverishing when it is not starving or killing off the bottom 80%. It has been responsible for many millions of deaths in the last few decades, mostly via denial of medical care through mandated state kickbacks. In some societies like Israel, Europe and Russia, it is associated with racism in the form of ethnic nationalism – Jewish nationalism in Israel and White nationalism in Europe and Russia.

If Islamophobes were decent people themselves then we might have a movement to counterpoise the backwards and violent nature of Islam. Instead they are just as bad as the Muslims and in fact in many cases, they are probably even worse. They vastly exaggerate and lie about Muslims and Islam, and ridiculous overplay the dangers associated with this religion, which is mostly a danger to its own adherents anyway.

Anti-neocon Book Scuttled

According to the rather dubious Wayne Madsen Report, planned English and French editions of a book written by German journalist Jürgen Cain Külbel, “Mordakte Hariri,” (first published in German, then in Arabic) have been scuttled after it was attacked by Tony Blair, the U.S. Committee for a Free Lebanon (USCFL) and various Israel Lobby-linked groups in the US, Britain, Israel.

The USCFL is a neoconservative-funded organization with strong links to the Israel Lobby. Its main players are Lebanese Maronites who have fled Lebanon and are linked to the former Phalangist Catholic fascist forces in Lebanon. When one talks of the “poor Christians in Lebanon” it is useful to note who exactly we are talking about.

Unfortunately, many of the Lebanese Catholic Maronites are associated with a reactionary, fascist-like grouping called the Phalangists. This group is loosely modeled after Mediterranean-style Catholic blood-and-soil nationalist fascism of the Greek, Mussolini, Salazar and especially Franco types.

As the Angry Arab said of one of the most prominent Phalangists, Pierre Gemayal, who was recently assassinated, his family (the founders of the Phalangists) did more than anyone else to bring fascism to Lebanon.

The Maronites are apparently not descended from the ancient Phoenicians as their blood and soil crap would have it but instead are descended from an Arab tribe that resisted the conversion to Islam and moved to Lebanon around 700 years ago. Although they are culturally Arabized and speak Arabic, they often refuse to be called Arabs and regard it as an insult.

Many of them spoke Aramaic until 200 years ago or so. They tend to live in the mountainous center of Lebanon. Centuries of resistance while hiding in their mountain roundabouts, against Muslim aggression and attempts at forced conversion have radicalized them in an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim manner.

When the Crusaders invaded the region centuries ago, tragically, many of the Maronites sided with the invaders against their Arab brothers. And so it has been ever since. The Maronites have always looked West, not East, and saw themselves as part of Europe, not the Arab World.

This shows even in their religious affiliation – linking with Rome instead of the Eastern Orthodox as many Eastern Catholics have done. The arrival of Israeli Jewish settler-colonial invaders in Palestine was cheered by many Maronites, as they were seen as a European colonial group injecting European culture and values into the Arabized and Islamicized region.

Many Maronites, instead of resisting the colonization of Lebanon by the French, sided with the colonizers along with many other Christians and Jews in the Arab World. The very state of Lebanon was lopped off of Syria by the French in order to create a fake “Christian state” where one had never existed.

Syria and pan-Syrianists have resisted this severing of the motherland ever since. The purpose of this diversion about the Maronites is not to bash them, but instead to regard them as the inevitable victims of history. There is another way to be a Christian in Lebanon, and not all Maronites have gone the way of the Phalange.

Other identities are possible – it is not necessary to wallow in fascism. The Greek Orthodox have embraced a form of pan-Syrianism that, while problematic, is at least anti-imperialist, pro-Arab and patriotic.

Anyway, back to the book. Külbel’s book strongly suggests that former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was assassinated not by Syria but by neoconservative elements trying to spark a civil war that in Lebanon that would ultimately benefit both Israel and the pro-Israeli Phalangists.

This theory is highly dubious. No one knows who assassinated Hariri. The killing is being blamed on an obscure radical Islamist – and a strange Islamist group claimed responsibility for it – but the argument is that the Islamist was duped by Syrian intelligence. This “patsy” argument is currently not proven.

Possibly Syria did it – I would not put it past them – but the evidence is not really there yet. Hariri signed on to the imperialist and Zionist plot known as UN Security Council Resolution 1559, which threw Syrian forces out of Lebanon and more importantly, demanded that Hezbollah disarm its forces.

Syria has one main objective in the region – the return of the Golan Heights illegally stolen by Israel in the 1967 War. In pursuit of that goal, it funds Hezbollah as a means of keeping up the heat on Israel.

Syria will sell out everyone and everything – Arabism, the Palestinians, the works, to get the Golan back. 1559 would have resulted in the loss of Syria’s last card in its deck to get back the Golan. By signing onto 1559, Hariri may have signed his death warrant.

Madsen reports that neoconservative propaganda efforts against Western journalists are run out of numerous blogs. In particular, GIYUS (Give Israel Your United Support), funded by the World Union of Jewish Students (WUJS) was singled out.

A pro-Israeli Lobby cabal has also been revealed as operating in the German media, including Der Spiegel, Die Welt, and the NTV network (a CNN affiliate). Victims of their character assassination charades include Elfriede Jelinek (a Nobel laureate for Literature), actor Sir Peter Ustinov, and singer Cat Stevens.

An Excerpt From the “Memoirs of Hadrian” by Marguerite Yourcenar

Repost from the old site.

For this post I am going to post a bit from a delightful book I just came across called The Memoirs of Hadrian, by Marguerite Yourcenar, a French novelist. It was translated from French to English in the 1950′s and 60′s by her lesbian live-in partner, Grace Frick. The English translation was published in 1963. Frick’s translation was widely praised.

This is a psychological and historical novel, not an actual memoir, and perhaps that is why it sounds so contemporary. This choice novel, a best seller in France 50 years ago, is just as contemporary as if it had been written yesterday. A film adaptation by John Boorman is due to start shooting in Italy in Spring 2006.

No matter how long ago they lived, the Romans were so much more like us than we ever want to believe. The fictional voice of Hadrian, the third of the five so-called “good Roman emperors”, so eloquent, learned and wise, could be that of a high-ranking military or political official in 2006.

I will intersperse this bit of treasure with my comments, which will be in bold. My comments will often try to relate this ancient events to contemporary events, to show how history lives within all of us, as we are all products of the past and molders of the future, and how thereby the past, present and future tend to merge via human agency, culture, genetics and tradition.

We are where we are and we do what we do in part because of history, whether we like it or not. And what we are and do now creates the future, whether we like that or not.

Hence, as Kurt Vonnegut notes in one of his books, referring to a obscure science fiction short story (I think, The Music of the Spheres by Stuart J. Byrne, but I may be wrong), the past, present and future are all simultaneously occurring right at this very moment.

But I digress…

This section refers to the Simon Bar Kokhba Rebellion (otherwise known as either the Second or Third Roman-Jewish War) amongst the Jews which took place in the Roman colonial province of Judaea (now Israel or Palestine) from 132-135 AD. There is also a passing reference to Jewish heroine Esther and the Jewish holiday of Purim, the celebration of which just passed us by.

Since this blog frequently discusses Israel, Jews, Palestine and the conflict in that region, and a recent post discussed Purim, I figure this excerpt has contemporary relevance, if only to replay the skipping record called “History repeats itself”.

Perhaps the word Judaean is more appropriate than the word Jewish in this context, since the Jewish religion at that time was quite different, in my opinion, despite what Zionist propaganda tells us, from modern rabbinical Judaism. Hence, I will use Judaean instead of Jew when describing this war. This is also a dig at Jewish primordialist volkisch Zionism, which I oppose).

Judaea was still majority-Judaean at this time, even after the failed First Judaean Revolt and the destruction of Herod’s Temple in Jerusalem around 65 years prior that left around 950,000 Judaeans dead and many others sold into slavery.

Though this blog supports most anti-colonial rebellions as a general rule, it is interesting to see the Bar Kokhba Revolt through the eyes of a secular Roman. Hadrian felt the Judaeans were fanatics, and clearly they were.

Many Romans also felt that the Christians of that time were also fanatics, and in fact many of them were also. In the Romans’ eyes, all the Romans asked was for the Christians to swear allegiance to Rome and pay their Roman taxes, and the Christians refused to do either, especially the swearing allegiance part. Instead, they preferred to kill themselves.

The Romans thought these suicides were the acts of an insane religious fanatical death cult, in the same way that many of us nowadays feel that Muslim suicide bombers are part of a crazy fanatical religious death cult.

Many Romans were secular, believe it or not, especially the educated ones. They had their Roman gods, of course, but many Romans, especially the ruling classes, didn’t really believe in their own gods very much.

In 130, Hadrian visited the devastated city of Jerusalem, which had still not been rebuilt after the Romans laid it to ruins some 70 years prior. Hadrian felt sorry for the Judaeans and promised to rebuild the city.

But the Judaeans became angry when word got out that Hadrian was going to rebuild the city as a pagan metropolis instead of a Judaean holy city and that he was going to rebuild the Judaeans’ Second Temple as a pagan temple to the Roman god Jupiter. The new city was to be named Aelina Capitolina. The Judaeans regarded the excavation of the Temple to rebuild it as a pagan monument as a religious transgression.

In 131, Hadrian added insult to injury by banning circumcision, which the Judaeans practiced as an essential part of their religion. Hadrian viewed circumcision as primitive, barbaric, body mutilation.

The Jewish wise man Akiva convinced the Judaean religious leadership of the Sanhedrin to rebel against the Romans. A military hero named Simon Bar Kokhba was chosen to be the leader. The name means sun of a star in Aramaic. It is interesting that the Judaeans at that time were speaking Aramaic, not the Hebrew of primordialist Zionist fantasy.

Simon Bar Kokhba was also designated the Judaean Messiah. This designation deeply offended many Christians (who were still mostly converted Jews at this time) since they felt that Christ was the real Messiah. Consequently the Christians would not support the rebellion.

In 132, the rebellion began, and the Judaeans had learned from the two previous rebellions and fought well. The Romans were routed, and for 2 1/2 years a Judaean state called The Era of the Redemption of Israel was formed. Bar Kokhba designated himself Nasi Israel, or ruler of Israel.

The crazy, endless procession of animal sacrifice at the Judaean Temple was restarted, which, in my opinion, is an example of one of the most primitive forms of ethnoreligious barbarism known to mankind (Sorry, Jewish readers!).

From morning to evening, the line of Judaeans with animals to sacrifice would snake away from the Temple and the blood of the slaughtered beasts ran red like a river away from the building!

The Romans gathered up a huge army and fought for three years. In 135, Bar Kokhba was driven to a redoubt at Betar. The fortress of Betar was then overwhelmed and the Judaeans were defeated. 580,000 Judaeans lay dead.

Much later, the name Betar was adopted in the 1920′s by a Jewish proto-fascist organization in the Jabotinskyist tradition. In my opinion, the recrudescence of the Betar decades later became the Kach or Kahane Movement, although the original Betar Movement apparently still exists at a much reduced level, since I visited their website not long ago.

However, just to demonstrate the proto-fascist roots of the Israeli Likud party, let us note that current and former Israeli Likud leaders such as former Prime Ministers Yitzak Shamir and Menachem Begin, current Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, and former Defense Minister Moshe Arens are all former members of Betar.

The fact that the US media fawned and fawns over such crypto-fascist characters is profoundly disturbing and makes one question the extent to which our media believes in democracy, if such folks are regarded as role models.

Hadrian tried to wipe out the Judaean religion, which he felt was the source of repeated rebellions. He banned the Judaean calendar and Torah Law and had many Judaean scholars executed. He built Roman statues on the ruins of the Temple and burned the Judaeans’ sacred scroll.

Jewish scholarship moved to Babylonia (Iraq) where the Babylonian Talmud was written hundred of years later, from 400-700, laying the foundation for modern rabbinical Judaism. Judaism started to reject radicalism and messianism and became more cautious and conservative. This can be seen in the Talmud’s reference to Bar Kokhba as Ben-Kusiba, which means false prophet.

As the final insult, he renamed Judaea to Syria Palaestina, after the Judaeans’ ancient, now-extinct enemies, the Philistines. This is one silly reason that Jewish Zionists find the geographical term Palestine so infuriating and illegitimate. Do Zionists really get livid about events 1,870 years ago? Zionists do.

It is interesting that hysterical, racist Jewish Zionist promoters of settler-colonialism in Palestine may be entirely wrong about the name Palestine coming from the Roman renaming of Jerusalem as Syria Palaestina, even if ultimately the dispute is just more Zionist verbal subterfuge and sophistry.

For instance, in the 1100′s BC, Egyptians refer to the inhabitants of Palestine as “Peleset” or “sea-people” because around this time, there was a lot of settlement going on in Palestine via Mediterranean seafaring trade merchants. The Akkadian language from the same period refers to the Southern Syrian region as Palashtu.

In fact, most Egyptian and Akkadian references to the region, even during the Judaean period, refer to it as Peleset (Egyptian also refers to it as Deyen, probably a reference to Danaos of myth) or Palashtu, and less commonly as Israel.

Judaeans only started showing up in Palestine en masse around 900 BC. But according to crazy Zionist ethnonationalist volkisch liars, only the Jews have always been there! Go figure!

Following Hadrian’s order, Jerusalem was renamed Aelia Capitolina, turned into a Roman pagan city, and Judaeans were forbidden from entering the city. Most modern Jews regard the uprising as a horrible tragedy, and certainly many Judaeans lost their lives.

But at the time, Bar Kokhba was widely regarded as a religious fanatic akin to the way many of us see Osama bin Laden or Pat Robertson, even by many of his own people. As you can see in the text, most Jews outside of Judaea were not much interested in the rebellion, which they tended to view as fanatical and not in their interests.

This text shows another side to the Bar Kokhba rebellion, cleansed of its Zionist primordialist whitewashing, exemplified by Jabotinsky’s proto-fascist Betar above and David Ben-Gurion (the father of Israel) taking his name from one of Bar Kokhba’s generals.

This text comes to me via a friend who got it from a mailing list he is on. He reports that a “cultured Arab” typed the text below out from the novel and sent it to the list. We thank this Arab, whoever he may be, for this bit of manna from heaven.

Now – On to the Romans and the Israelites!

Memoirs of Hadrian

By Marguerite Yourcenar

Translated from the French, New York,1954-1963

Excerpts from pages 233-249 for the years 132-135 AD:

…Jewish affairs were going from bad to worse. The work of construction was continuing in Jerusalem, in spite of the violent opposition of Zealot groups.

[RL: The construction referred to is Hadrian's rebuilding Jerusalem as Aelina Capitolina, a Roman pagan city with a Roman pagan temple built in place of the destroyed Judaean temple. The violent opposition described is that of Judaeans who regarded the construction as a sin.]

A certain number of errors has been committed, not irreparable in themselves but immediately seized upon by fomenters of trouble for their own advantage.

The Tenth Legion Fretensis has a wild boar for its emblem; when its standard was placed at the city gates, as is the custom, the populace, unused to painted or sculptured images (deprived as they have been for centuries by superstition highly unfavorable to the progress of the arts),

[RL: Note that Hadrian regarded the Judaeans as uncivilized, backwards, fanatical barbarians, a view shared by many Romans.]

…mistook that symbol for a swine, the meat of which is forbidden them, and read into that insignificant affair an affront to the customs of Israel.

The festivals of the Jewish New Year, celebrated with a din of trumpets and ram’s horns, give rise every year to brawling and bloodshed; our authorities accordingly forbade the public reading of a certain legendary account devoted to the exploits of a Jewish heroine (Easther) who was said to have become, under an assumed name, the concubine of a king…

…of Persia (Iran), and to have instigated a savage massacre of the enemies of her despised and persecuted race. The rabbis managed to read at night what the governor Tineus Rufus forbade them to read by day; that barbarous story, wherein Persians and Jews rivaled each other in atrocities, roused the nationalistic fervor of the Zealots to frenzy (a feast of Purim).

[RL: Note the Roman view of Purim as a barbaric spectacle of bloodthirsty revenge, a view that, unfortunately, I share. Are the Jews to celebrate this blood-soaked festival, which promotes the notion that Jews and non-Jews are locked in eternal conflict until the end of time, forever? If so, what are the chances of reconciliation between Jews and non-Jews? Zero?]

Finally, this same Tineus Rufus, a man of good judgment in other respects and not uninterested in Israel’s traditions and fables, decided to extend to the Jewish practice of circumcision the same severe penalties of the law which I had recently promulgated against castration (and which was aimed especially at cruelties perpetrated upon young slaves for the sake of exorbitant gain or debauch).

[RL: Note that the Romans put circumcision on a par with castration! I certainly do not agree, being circumcised myself. I regard anti-circumcision activists as ill-advised kooks, and the whole movement has a wide streak of anti-Semitism running through it.

If you are interested in the subject, just search Google and discover all sorts of web pages devoted to the "horrors of circumcision".]

He hoped thus to obliterate one of the marks whereby Israel claims to distinguish itself from the rest of human kind.

I took the less notice of the danger of that measure, when I received word of it, in that many wealthy and enlightened Jews whom one meets in Alexandria (Egypt) and in Rome have ceased to submit their children to a practice which makes them ridiculous in the public baths and gymnasiums and they even arrange to conceal the evidence on themselves.

I was unaware of the extent to which these banker collectors of myrrhine vases differed from the true Israel. As I said, nothing in all that was beyond repair, but the hatred, the mutual contempt, and the rancor were so.

In principle, Judaism has its place among the religions of the empire; in practice, Israel has refused for centuries to be one people among many others, with one god among the gods.

The most primitive Dacians (Bulgarians) know that their Zalmoxis is called Jupiter in Rome; the Phoenician Baal of Mount Casius has been readily identified with the Father who holds Victory in his hands, and whom Wisdom is born; the Egyptians, though so proud of their myths some thousands of years old, are willing to see in Osiris a Bacchus with funeral attributes; harsh Mithra admits himself brother of Apollo.

No people but Israel has the arrogance to confine truth wholly within the narrow limits of a single conception of divine, thereby insulting the manifold nature of Deity, who contains all; no other god has inspired his worshipers with disdain and hatred for those who pray at different altars.

[RL: Here Hadrian hints at an age-old clue to the riddle of anti-Semitism - the chauvinism of the Jews. How did the Jews persevere as a minority for 2000 years amidst frequent oppression? It's the racism, stupid!

How about by preaching racist hatred against all non-Jews, banning most contact with Gentiles other than for business, and even building ghettos for themselves to keep their people from mingling with Gentiles?

How about by saying prayers throughout the day, every day, cursing the Gentiles in every way and wishing for their destruction, and instituting vicious penalties for Jewish women who had sex with Gentile men (like having their noses chopped off)?

Note that as late as 1800, any observant European Jew would refuse to eat or even have tea with any Gentile as a matter of custom. While this sort of behavior is a smart ethnocentric way of ensuring continuity of your race as a minority, it didn't exactly help the Jews to win friends and influence people, and to the extent it yet exists, it still doesn't.

Jewish separation and chauvinism is and was one of the major contributors to anti-Semitism, despite dishonest denials by Jewish scholars who specialize in and propagandize the mystification of anti-Semitism.]

I was only the more anxious to make Jerusalem a city like others, where several races and several beliefs could live in peace; but I was wrong to forget that in any combat between fanaticism and common sense the latter has rarely the upper hand.

[RL: Note here that Hadrian comes across as some sort of a Second Century universalist and multiculturalist!]

The clergy of the ancient city were scandalized by the opening of schools where Greek literature was taught; the rabbi Joshua, a pleasant, learned man with whom I had frequently conversed in Athens…

…but who was trying to excuse himself to his people for his foreign culture and his relations with us, now ordered his disciples not to take up such profane studies unless they could find an hour which was neither day or night…

[RL: Note again the ferocious condemnation by the Judaeans of those Judaeans who had extensive contact with Gentiles and the refusal of the Judaeans to assimilate to larger society in the tiniest way by studying Greek, which they regarded as a sin.]

…since Jewish law must be studied night and day. Ismael, an important member of the Sanhedrin, who supposedly adhered to the side of Rome, let his nephew Ben-Dama die rather than accept the services the Greek surgeon sent to him by Tineus Rufus.

[RL: Wow! Talk about fanaticism! No wonder the Romans were appalled by the Judaeans. The guy let his Judaean son die rather than have a "contaminated" and "unclean" Gentile doctor profane him by operating on his body!]

While here in Tibur means were still being sought to conciliate differences without appearing to yield to demands of fanatics, affairs in the East took a turn for the worse; a Zealot revolt triumphed in Jerusalem. An adventurer born of the very dregs of the people, a fellow named Simon who entitled himself Bar-Kokhba, Son of the Star, played the part of firebrand or incendiary mirror in that revolt.

I could judge this Simon only by hearsay; I have seen him but once face-to-face, the day a centurion brought me his severed head. Yet I am disposed to grant him that degree of genius which must always be present in one who rises so fast and so high in human affairs; such ascendancy is not gained without at least some crude skill.

The Jews of the moderate party were the first to accuse this supposed Son of the Star of deceit and imposture; I believe rather that this untrained mind was of the type which was taken in by its own lies, and that guile in his case went hand with fanaticism.

He paraded as the hero whom the Jewish people had awaited for centuries in order to gratify their ambitions and their hate; this demagogue proclaimed himself Messiah and King of Israel.

The aged Akiba, in a foolish state of exaltation, led the adventurer through the streets of Jerusalem, holding his horse by the bridle; the high priest Eleazar rededicated the temple, said to be defiled from the time that uncircumcised visitors had crossed its threshold.

[RL: Note again the Judaean association of Gentiles with uncleanness, contamination and profaneness. Gypsies also have this view of non-Gypsies, and similarly, they have also played the role of European minority from the East locked into endless conflict with non-Gypsies, as the European Jews from the East were locked into endless conflict with Gentiles].

Stacks of arms hidden underground for nearly twenty years were distributed to the rebels by agents of the Son of the Star; they also had recourse to weapons formerly rejected for our ordnance as defective (and purposely constructed thus by Jewish workers in our arsenals over a period of years).

Zealot groups attacked isolated Roman garrisons and massacred our soldiers with refinements of cruelty that recalled the worst memories of the Jewish revolt under Trajan; Jerusalem finally fell wholly into the hands of the insurgents, and the new quarters of Aelia Capitolina were set burning like a torch.

The first detachments of the Twenty-Second Legion Deiotariana, sent from Egypt with utmost speed under the command of the legate of Syria, Publius Marcellus, were routed by bands ten times their number. The revolt had become war, and war to the bitter end.

Two legions, the Twelfth Fulminata and the Sixth Ferrata, came immediately to reinforce the troops already stationed in Judea; some months later, Julius Severus took charge of the military operations. He had formerly pacified the mountainous regions of Northern Britain…

[RL: This is a reference to the last holdouts of the Celtic Empire, (in this case, Scotland) which once stretched across Europe from one end to the other, already at this time largely destroyed and scattered by Roman conquest.

The most recalcitrant of the Celts were in the far western edges of Europe, in the least habitable and most difficult-to-pacify areas, where to this day, the last holdouts of the Celtic languages Scots Gaelic, Irish Gaelic, Breton, and Welsh fight for survival and the Cornish and Manx languages rise from the dead.]

…and brought with him some small contingents of British auxiliaries accustomed to fighting on difficult terrain.

Our heavily equipped troops and our officers trained to the square or the phalanx formation of pitched battles were hard put to it to adapt themselves to that war of skirmishes and surprise attacks which, even in open country, retained the techniques of street fighting.

Simon, a great man in his way, had divided his followers into hundreds of squadrons posted on mountain ridges or placed in ambush in caverns and abandoned quarries, or even hidden in houses of the teeming suburbs of the cities. Severus was quick to grasp that such an elusive enemy could be exterminated, but not conquered; he resigned himself to a war of attrition.

The peasants, fired by Simon’s enthusiasm, or terrorized by him, made common cause with the Zealots from the start; each rock became a bastion, each vineyard a trench; each tiny farm had to be starved out, or taken by assault. Jerusalem was not recaptured until the third year, when last efforts to negotiate proved futile; what little of the Jewish city had been spared by the destruction under Titus was now wiped out.

Severus closed his eyes for a long time, voluntarily, to the flagrant complicity of the other large cities (which) now become the last fortresses of the enemy; they were later attacked and reconquered in their turn, street by street and ruin by ruin. In those times of trial my place was with the army, and in Judea….

In the spring of the third year of campaign the army laid siege to the citadel of Bethar, an eagle’s nest where Simon and his partisans held out for nearly a year against the slow tortures of hunger, thirst, and despair, and where the Son of the Star saw his followers perish one by one but still would not surrender.

Our army suffered almost as much as the rebels, for the latter, on retiring, had burned the forests, laid waste the fields, slaughtered the cattle, and polluted the wells by throwing our dead therein; these methods from savage times were hideous in a land naturally arid and already consumed to the bone by centuries of folly and fury.

The summer was hot and unhealthy; fever and dysentery decimated our troops, but an admirable discipline continued to rule in those legions, forced to inaction and yet obliged to be constantly on the alert; though sick and harassed, they were sustained by a kind of silent rage in which I, too, began to share….

In my dispatches to the Senate I suppressed the formula that is regulation for the opening of official communications: THE EMPEROR AND THE ARMY ARE WELL. The emperor and the army were, on the contrary, dangerously weary.

[RL: The leaders of Roman military campaigns, by tradition, began their missives and return speeches to the Roman Senate with the phrase, "The army and I are well." In this case, Hadrian left out this characteristic phrase. The fact that he did not say it is attested widely by historians, making it one of the most famous aspects of the Bar Kokhba Revolt.]

At night, after the last conversation with Severus, the last audience with fugitives from the enemy side, the last courier from Rome, the last message from Publius Marcellius or from Rufus, whose receptive tasks were to wipe up outside Jerusalem and to reorganize Gaza, Euphorion would measure my bath water sparingly into a tub of tarred canvas; I would lie down on my bed and try to think.

There is no denying it; that war in Judaea was one of my defeats. The crimes of Simon and the madness of Akiba were not of my making; but I reproached myself for having been blind in Jerusalem, heedless in Alexandria, impatient in Rome.

[RL: Hadrian traveled widely.]

I had not known how to find words that would have prevented, or at least retarded, this outburst of fury in a nation; I had not known in time how to be either supple enough or sufficiently firm.

Surely we had no reason to be unduly disturbed, and still less need to despair, the blunder and the reversal had occurred only in our relations with Israel; everywhere else at this critical hour we were reaping the reward of sixteen years of generosity in the Orient.

Simon had supposed that he could count on a revolt in the Arab world similar to the uprising that had darkened the last years of Trajan’s reign; even more, he had ventured to bank on Parthian (Persian) aid.

He was mistaken, and that error in calculation was causing him slow death in the besieged citadel of Bethar: the Arab tribes were drawing apart from the Jewish communities; the Parthians remained faithful to the treaties.

The synagogues of the great Syrian cities proved undecided or lukewarm, the most ardent among them contenting themselves with sending money in secret to the Zealots; the Jewish population in Alexandria, though naturally so turbulent, remained calm; the abscess in Jewish affairs remained local, confined within the arid region which extends from Jordan to the sea; this ailing finger could safely be cauterized, or amputated.

And nevertheless, in a sense, the evil days which had immediately preceded my reign seemed to begin over again….The evening courier had just informed me that we had reestablished ourselves on the heap of tumbled stones which I called Aelia Capitolina and which the Jews still called Jerusalem; we had burned the Ascalon, and had been forced to mass executions of rebels in Gaza.

[RL: The Ascalon was the Judaeans' sacred scroll.]

If sixteen years of rule by a prince so pacifically inclined were to culminate in the Palestine campaign, then the chances for peace in the world looked dim ahead. I raised myself on my elbow, uneasy on the narrow camp bed.

To be sure, there were some Jews who had escaped the Zealot contagion: even in Jerusalem the Pharisees spat on the ground before Akiba, treating that fanatic like an old fool who threw to the wind the solid advantages of the Roman peace, and shouting to him that grass would grow from his mouth before Israel’s victory would be seen on this earth.

But I preferred even false prophets to those lovers of order at all cost who, though despising us, counted on us to protect them from Simon’s demands upon their gold (placed for safety with Syrian bankers), and upon their farms in Galilee.

I thought of the deserters from his camp who, a few hours back, had been sitting in my tent, humble, conciliatory, servile, but always managing to turn their back to the image of my Genius.

Our best agent, Elias Ben-Abayad, who played the role of informer and spy for Rome, was justly despised by both camps; he was nevertheless the most intelligent man in the group, a liberal mind but a man sick at heart, torn between love for his people and his liking for us and for our culture; he too, however, thought essentially only of Israel.

Joshua Ben-Kisma, who preached appeasement, was but more timid, or more hypocritical (than) Akiba. Even in the rabbi Joshua, who had long been my counselor in Jewish affairs, I had felt irreconcilable differences under that compliance and desire to please, a point where two opposite kinds of thinking meet only to engage in combat.

[RL: We see here the ancient complaint against the Jews of "dual loyalty", which obviously is and was often based on verifiable fact (much more so in the past than today).

The Jews have been ferociously ethnocentric for centuries, to the point of seeing non-Jews as agents of contagion and contamination, and even banning Jews from the tiniest non-business relations with Gentiles.

That this mindset would make most Jews (at least until around 1800 or so, and in some places and/or during certain times afterwards) more loyal to the tribe than to whatever despised state they were minority residents in at the time seems as clear as air.]

Our territories extended over hundreds of leagues and thousands of stadia beyond that dry, hilly horizon, but the rock of Bethar was our frontier; we could level to dust the massive walls of that citadel where Simon in his frenzy was consummating his suicide, but we could not prevent that race from answering us…

I raised my head and moved slightly in order to limber myself. From the top of Simon’s citadel, vague gleams reddened the sky, unexplained manifestations of the nocturnal life of the enemy. The wind was blowing from Egypt; a whirl of dust passed like a specter; the flattened rims of the hills reminded me of the Arabic range of moonlight.

I went slowly back, drawing a fold of my cloak over my mouth, provoked with myself for having devoted to hollow meditations upon the future a night which I could have employed to prepare the work of the next day, or to sleep.

The collapse of Rome, if it were to come about, will concern my successors; in that eight hundred and forty-seventh year of the Roman era my task consisted of stifling the revolt in Judea and bringing back from the Orient, without too great loss, an ailing army. In crossing the (camp’s) esplanade I slipped at times on the blood of some rebels executed the evening before.

I lay down on my bed without undressing, to be awakened two hours later by the trumpets at dawn.

End of the excerpt.

Review of the Recent Israel-Gaza War

Very impressive video from Hamas showing their new underground rocket launchers. This is a major advance for the Palestinian fighting force. They probably got the idea for making these things underground from Hezbollah, who has perfected the art of underground launchers. As you can see, there is a heavy metal door protecting the launcher from attack. The door opens and the launchers fire. Then the door closes, and the launcher goes back underground.

In addition, Hamas and other Palestinians have dramatically upgraded their missile arsenals with Katyushas and Fajrs. Most of those are coming via Iran and possibly Hezbollah. No doubt they are smuggled in from the Sinai.

Now their missile launching capability is much upgraded, as the new Fajrs have a range of more than 25 miles. Recent attacks have hit Tel Aviv and its suburbs itself. A missile was intercepted over Holon by the Israeli Iron Dome, and shrapnel landed on a car, setting it on fire. A town just south of Tel Aviv was also hit, but the missile landed in an open area.

Another couple of missiles hit the sea off Tel Aviv. Missiles hitting the sea are actually quite dangerous because that is the flight path for the jets arriving and leaving Tel Aviv airport. Hence a number of countries are cancelling their flights to Israel.

The greater Tel Aviv area is called Gush Dan.

Another missile was launched at Jerusalem itself, instead hitting just south of Jerusalem in the Gush Etzion colonial settlement block on Arab land in the West Bank. However, this also landed on open land.

Hamas has also been trying repeatedly to hit the Israeli nuclear reactor in Dimona with missiles. However, all of these missiles have landed outside of the town of Dimona in the desert. It’s uncertain what sort of damage a missile might do to a nuclear reactor.

Hamas and other groups are indeed shooting these rockets willy-nilly at Israeli towns. However, they are also targeting the Israeli military. A rocket hit a truck carrying tanks on a highway leading towards Gaza. An underground tunnel under the border was packed with explosives and detonated under a group of Israeli military trucks, overturning them. No one was in the trucks at the time.

Before the recent attack, an anti-tank rocket was fired by the PFLP at a jeep just over the Gaza border, wounding 3 soldiers.

In truth, Hamas and others lack good intelligence of where Israeli soldiers even are, though they may have some idea of where Israeli military bases are. The missiles are quite inaccurate. So even if the Gazans knew where Israeli bases and troops were, it would be hard to target them due to their inferior intelligence and accuracy of their weapons.

On the other hand, firing missiles willy-nilly at civilian towns and cities is definitely terrorism all right, even if Israeli casualties have been very low so far. Thus far, 3 Israelis have been killed, all civilians. The number of Israeli wounded is hard to figure, and I have had a hard time coming up with good figures. The best figure I can come up with is around 24 Israelis wounded so far, 21 civilians and 2 soldiers. If anyone can come up with better figures, let me know.

Casualties on the other side are even harder to figure. Hamas lists ~60 Gazans killed so far, but Israel says only 17 have been killed. Hamas has already been caught faking a video for propaganda purposes. A civilian was shown being carried away on a stretcher amid screaming civilians, but the same man was shown on another video walking away from the scene 10 minutes later. Propaganda like that is disgusting, but all sides do it in wartime.

I must say it is amazing that Palestinian rockets are hitting Jerusalem and Tel Aviv!

The killing of the commander of the Hamas armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, set off this recent war. It’s true that quite a few rockets have been fired at Israel lately for whatever reason. The assassination of Ahmed al-Jabari and his son while they were driving in a car in Gaza City has got a lot of news. Israel was quick to describe him as an arch-terrorist, but the truth is more complex.

It is true that al-Jabari has led the group since 2002, and is responsible for many suicide bombings in the early days before the Wall was built. In recent years, he has been behind many of the rocket attacks that hit Israel.

However, other groups have also been shooting rockets. Recently, most rockets were fired by the Resistance Committees, the Al Qaeda Salafist groups and Islamic Jihad.

The truth is that  al-Jabari has been Israel’s enforcer in the Gaza. There has been a relative truce since Operation Cast Lead, and it is al-Jabari who has enforced that truce. His job is mostly to keep nignogs from these other groups from shooting rockets, but that’s easier said than done. In many cases, Hamas has been able to get these groups to stop shooting rockets.

But that’s hard to do. For one thing, Hamas has only shaky control over Gaza, and the last thing they want is a civil war between them and the other armed groups. Another point is that resistance to Israel is very popular in Gaza, and Hamas looks like the bad guy by shooting it down, even against nignog-firing rocketeers. If Hamas comes to be seen too much as Israel’s enforcer, they can lose ground to other groups in Gaza, particularly Islamic Jihad.

By killing al-Jabari, Israel sent him a  message. The message was that as far as enforcing the truce and getting clowns to quite shooting rockets, he wasn’t doing a good enough job.

Hamas predictably reacted with fury to the assassination, and the hot war was on. Frankly, Hamas is getting its ass beat in this war. Many of their rockets have been intercepted, and there have been few casualties and little damage on the Israeli side.

There are risks to both sides in backing down from this war. The first side to give in, capitulate and call for a ceasefire risks being seen as weak, and neither side wants to give that impression. However, Hamas is being badly beaten here, so Turkey and Egypt are busy trying to get a ceasefire going. There’s little call for a truce on the Israeli side.

Israel is massing a huge force outside Gaza, and the idea is that they may go in there in a ground operation. That doesn’t seem like it would solve anything, and it may just make matters worse.

Coinciding with the rocket barrage, there have been many rock and Molotov cocktail attacks on cars driven by colonial settler invaders in the West Bank. Casualties from these attacks have been minimal.

I fully support armed actions against adult colonial settler invaders in the West Bank. They have no business being there, and they need to go home. I can’t support attacks on Israeli citizens inside the Green Line nor on Israeli minors in the West Bank. Attacks on kids are never right – minor civilians of any type are never a military target.

My attitude is that this whole war is pretty stupid. Hamas’ shooting of rockets is futile and will accomplish nothing but the destruction of their infrastructure and arsenal. Israel is already trying to kill the Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniya.

On the other hand, what can Israel do? There are 2 million Arabs in Gaza, and they are not going anywhere anytime soon. Israel has created an open air prison since Hamas won the election, and its arguable that Gazans might be justified in attacks for the imposition of this prison itself.

Most Gazans are refugees from the surrounding Israeli towns in South Israel. The former Arab towns were razed, their residents thrown out, and Jewish towns filled with Jews were built in their place. It is on these very towns and cities that these former refugees in Gaza are presently firing their missiles.

By far the best source for up to date information on the War is Israel National News, or Arutz Sheva. This is an outlet for the Far Right in Israel, the national-religious crowd. Nevertheless, no one does a better job of covering the conflict.

What Is Zionism?

Repost from the old site.

I was visiting my Mother the other day (she lives 33 miles away) and she had just read some articles on my blog. She made some negative remarks about “Zionists”, at which point I informed her that she was a Zionist. She looked horrified, which is the way any decent person should look when accused of such a thing. I then patiently explained to her than anyone who supported a Jewish state in Palestine was a Zionist.

She looked disappointed. On further questioning, it turned out that she pretty much thought that the founding of Israel was a great big mistake and a crime – like the founding of the USA via the conquest of the American Indians. However, she said you can’t undo history, and people have to try to make do with reality as it is.

I then told her that her views were probably “non-Zionist” – that being someone who disapproved of the Zionist project, but that that we should live with the reality of it, as Israel is there, and it’s not going away. My brother, on questioning, also did not really know what Zionism is, and also qualified as a non-Zionist who thought we needed to deal with reality as it exists, not as it ought to be.

The views that they espouse – “That the creation of Israel was a mistake, but they are there, they’re not leaving, and we have to deal with that” – ought to rationally be considered by progressives as neither Zionism nor anti-Zionism, but non-Zionism.

In the course of my conversations with these two brilliant, highly-educated immediate family members, I realized that even the best and the brightest in the US did not really know what Zionism was.

So, with that in mind, I felt it was time for a post describing exactly what Zionism was and is, its history and its various forms. Obviously, this brief post will barely begin to nudge the edges of this subject, but still it ought to serve as a nice primer.

What is Zionism anyway? I see Zionism every day on the net. In a nutshell, most Zionists, but not all, argue that both the formation of the state of Israel and the settler-colonial project that created it were right, just and proper.

A principal Zionist argument (though not shared by all Zionists) is this:

1. Jewish land, not Arab land – All of Israel is Jewish land. The Arabs have no right to any of this land.

Several arguments are used to defend this view:

1. Historical- Jews had a continuing presence in the land for 3,000 years, so therefore it is their land. The Arab presence is illegitimate. When the Zionist project began, there were only a few Arabs in Palestine anyway, and they were the ancestors of Arabs who invaded Jewish land in 640 and have been occupying Jewish land ever since.Arabs never controlled Palestine anyway, and all Palestinians are Arab invading colonists who have no right to be there and need to go back to Arabia where they came from. Jews were completely in their right to reclaim their homeland after so many years in exile.This is one of the most vicious and wicked Zionist arguments, and it is extremely popular amongst the hardest of the hardline, blood-and-soil, organic nationalist types.One can argue that this is the philosophy that it is at the core of the mindset of the leaders of the Zionist movement from 1897 to the present. It is this argument, that, like most primordialist ethnic nationalist projects that rose out of Central and Eastern Europe in the 1800′s, is most similar to Nazism.On the other hand, all modern ethnic nationalisms (in particular Arab nationalism, Indian Hindu nationalism, Lebanese Phalangist nationalism and all of the ethnic nationalist projects that swept Central and Eastern Europe in the 1920′s and 1930′s) came from the same 19th Century core as Nazism, so it is somewhat unfair to single out Zionism in that regard.
2. Religious – God gave the land to the Jews. It is Jewish land and will always be so. God watches over the Jews and Israel, and no one can mess with them. Anyone who messes with the Jews or Israel gets punished by God. This is obviously a favorite of conservative Zionists, though some secular liberal Zionists use it too, usually cynically in an effort to get Gentile Christians to go along with the project.
3. Holocaust – Jews needed a safe haven in Israel due to the Holocaust, and it was ok to throw out the Arabs to get this haven. A favorite of liberal Zionists, many of whom are ignorant of the specifics of the project. When questioned, many of this type will insist that no Arabs were thrown out to make the Jewish state. Apparently the land was just empty or something.
4. Freedom From Persecution – Related to the above. Jews have been persecuted everywhere they have been, so it is reasonable for them to have their own state where they can be safe. A favorite of more liberal Zionists. One of their favorite lines is that Zionism is “affirmative action for Jews”. Micheal Lerner of Tikkun is fond of that phrase.
5. UN and League of Nations – These two organizations agreed to give away Arab land to Jews for a homeland at different times. Therefore, Israel is legitimate. Once again, a favorite of more liberal Zionists and folks who are fond of the UN and international law.
6. Self-determination and National Liberation – All other ethnic groups have a right to self-determination on their homeland, and many have developed national liberation movements to obtain their nation-state. Zionism is the Jewish equivalent. This argument is a favorite of Zionist liberals and Leftists.
7. British Donation – Britain gave the land – British land – to the Jews. Therefore, it is the Jews’ land. This one is also a favorite of more liberal Zionists, because it avoids the question of whether or not Israel is Jewish land.

A number of the National-Religious types (see arguments A and B above – they are typically combined into a highly toxic form called National-Religious Zionism) claim that the land of Israel extends from the Nile to the Euphrates. It encompasses most of Lebanon and Syria, all of Jordan, part of Iraq, all of the Sinai, part of Arabia and all of Kuwait.

There are actually a fair number of Zionists who feel that all (or some) of this should be reconquered.

When an aide to President Truman visited the Holy Land around 1947 to try to understand the Zionist-Arab conflict, he said that all of the Jews he met there held the Nile to Euphrates view. He also noted that they did not like to talk about it too much, and they seemed to want to keep it a sort of secret, as if they were afraid of the reaction of outsiders if they learned of the Zionist plans.

Despite super-liar and modern-day Crusader Daniel Pipes’ articulate lie, The Nile to Euphrates Calumny, Nile to Euphrates Zionists are not mythological, and I have run across them fairly regularly on the Net, especially lately.

Does Mr. Pipes feel that I have hallucinated all of these Greater Israel types? Were they all just Arab agents out to make the Zionists look bad? Inquiring minds want to know. Mr. Pipes or his supporters are encouraged to email me here to explain how it is that I keep running into these nonexistent phantasms.

A lesser view holds that “Eretz Israel” at least covers all of Green Line Israel, all of the West Bank, the Golan Heights and the Gaza Strip. Some also include the Sinai Peninsula (or at least a small part of it up to the Wadi Arish) and southern Lebanon to the Litani River.

A map demonstrating Zionist armed settler-colonialism in action. Note the progressive loss of Arab land to Zionist colonization. This was deliberate and planned from the very start. It all stems from the Zionist principle that all of Israel, the West Bank, Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights is Jewish land and that the local Arabs are “squatting” on Jewish land and live there only at the whim of the Zionist owners.

Presently, the project is to make the remaining Arab enclaves so miserable that the Arabs will leave and then the Zionists can colonize their land.

This is a Minimal Greater Israel view and is very common. It was the “minimal view” adopted by the “progressives” of Left Socialist Zionism under David Ben-Gurion, the founder of Israel. It could logically be called Minimal Greater Israel.

Ben-Gurion’s ideological opponents, Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionists, held similar views, except that they typically claimed all of Jordan for the Jewish state also.

Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of the Revisionist Zionist movement. He authored The Iron Wall in 1923, in which he openly advocated a Zionist settler-colonial movement, to be implemented by armed force backed by an imperial power. The reason armed force was needed, he said, was because of inevitable Arab resistance. Before that, Zionism had been largely focused on buying out the Arabs’ land, then throwing them off the land and settling it with Zionists.

 

A poster for the Irgun Zionist armed guerrilla group. This was one of the three major armed Zionist guerrilla factions in Palestine. It focused on attacks against both the British and the local Arabs. Note that Irgun claimed that not only all of Palestine, but also all of Jordan, was Jewish land, to be cleansed of Arab “squatters”, and to be conquered by force (note the rifle).

Irgun dissolved after the founding of Israel, and since then Mainstream Revisionist Zionism has gone pretty quiet about claims to Jordan. Look carefully at the map to see that Irgun also claimed the Golan Heights for the Zionists.

I have recently met Zionist Jews on the Net who are still upset at the British and the League of Nations for “promising” all of Jordan to the Zionists in the early 1920′s, and then “going back on their word”. Actually neither party did any such thing, and such thinking is based on a misreading of the League of Nations Mandate.

In a recent interview, a leader of the Zionist Organization of America, a very powerful, very militant Jewish Zionist group in the US, noted with a twinkle in his eye that all of Jordan was actually part of Israel and implied that Israel should conquer it at some future time. The attitudes of ZOA fanatics are rampant amongst the neoconservatives who were associated with the Bush Administration.

The notion of Greater Israel, not some phony notions about buffer zones or security zones, is and was the real reason for the occupation and colonies in the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan and the Sinai, and for the occupation of Southern Lebanon.

As you can imagine, this political project, Zionism, terrifies the Arabs and sends them into conniptions. My opinion is that Zionism is poisonous and that no people should have to put up with such a dangerous project, least of all the backwards Arabs.

There is a lot of nonsense about Greater Israel on the Internet, with devious Zionist sophists like Pipes holding that it is just a deranged, paranoid Arab fantasy. On the other hand, many anti-Zionists, especially Islamists, insist that all Zionists hold the radical Nile-to-Euphrates view.

As you can see above, that is not the case. The truth is that some Zionists do hold the Nile-to-Euphrates view, but the Israeli government does not, and most major Israeli political parties and political figures do not either.

The Minimal Greater Israel project described above is much more common and relevant. Anti-Zionists should focus on the minimal project for now and forget about the Nile To Euphrates project until we get some evidence that it amounts to more than the ravings of some Zionist radicals.

Anti-Zionism is a radical position, like Zionism. In general, not only do anti-Zionists strongly oppose the whole Zionist project, but they go usually so far as to say that, ideally, Israel has no right to exist, and should be dismantled in one way or another. The vast majority of Arabs are anti-Zionists in one way or another. If they tolerate Israel’s existence at all, it is only grudgingly.

Anti-Zionists differ on what should be done with the Zionist Jews who have settled in Israel.

Some say that all of those who themselves or whose relatives came to Palestine after 1917, when the Balfour Declaration was signed, have to go back where they came from.

This was the line espoused in the original PLO Charter of 1964 and continues to be espoused by some very radical Arab nationalist types, especially some Arab Communists.

Examples of organizations holding such views are NACAZAI (North American Congress Against Zionism and Racism), headed by Ziad Shaker AlJishi, a Palestinian refugee living in the US, and the the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) militants who run the Free Arab Voice website.

The FAV site is edited by Ibrahim Alloush and Mohammad Abu Nasr. Everyone associated with the FAV website is apparently a member of the political wing of the PFLP.

One of the editors takes the not-so-obvious nom de guerre of Nabila Harb. This pseudonym derives from Nabil Harb, an obscure PFLP cadre from the 1970′s who was part of a small PFLP cell that hijacked a Lufthansa airliner in Spain in an attempt to win the release of German urban guerrillas from the Baader-Meinhoff Gang.

The attempt failed when the plane was stormed by German Special Forces in Mogadishu, killing 3 of the 4 PFLP terrorists, but not before the cell had executed the captain of the plane in Yemen an act of gross criminality and stupidity.

The imprisoned members of the German ultra-Leftist group committed suicide right afterwards, effectively ending the existence of Baader-Meinhoff. But from its ashes would rise its successor, the much larger and more successful Red Army Faction.

However, unlike the PFLP, which is fairly heterodox and not necessarily extremely Arab nationalist anymore, the FAV is a hardline, pro-Saddam Arab nationalist site that is an excellent example of Arab Nationalist “Arab fascism” and “Arab Nazism”, as is NACAZAI. Free Arab Voice would be better characterized as a Palestinian Baathist site.

The 40 year old Dr. Alloush is a son of Palestinian refugees in Jordan. He is a Professor of Statistics and Economics at a university in Amman, Jordan. The mysterious Abu Nasr (a nom de guerre) is the author of the Iraqi Resistance Reports that can be found on the Internet.

The 59-year-old Nasr is a Palestinian who may have left Palestine after the 1967 war, may live somewhere in the West, and may have a PhD. He is fluent in Russian as well as English, which suggests he may have received education in the former Soviet Union. The PFLP was sending its higher-ranking cadres to the Soviet Union for education some years ago.

Alloush also runs an Arab nationalist list on the Net and a Yahoo group by the same name. Alloush has received some notoriety for appearing at a conference of Holocaust Deniers in Lebanon and endorsing their views. In fact, the FAV website foments Holocaust Denial itself. Both Nasr and Alloush are virulently anti-Semitic Arab Communists and excellent examples of “Arab fascism” and “Arab Nazism”, to their eternal discredit.

NACAZAI also holds Holocaust Denial views, in addition supporting the genocidal Khmer Rogue, being strongly pro-North Korea, pro-Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime and in favor of the genocidal ultra-racist Arab-Nazis in Sudan. FAV takes similar positions, except I don’t know how they feel about the Khmer Rogue.

Even worse, a virulently anti-Semitic, Nazi-like position statement by NACAZAI shows that the Zionists and neocons who rant about the anti-Semitic Left are not entirely incorrect. Such beasts do exist.

Other members of NACAZAI include John Paul Cupp, a Communist supporter of North Korea who lives in Oregon, and Kevin Walsh, a Communist white supremacist who was recently arrested in Arizona for threatening to kill President Bush and has been diagnosed as mentally ill under suspicious circumstances (I suspect he may be bipolar). Both Cupp and Walsh are virulent, Nazi-like anti-Semites.

The entire Left should distance itself from Cupp, Walsh, AlJishi, Nasr and Alloush, along with Arab Nazis and Arab fascists in general (which includes a large segment of the Arab nationalist movement) until they pull their heads out and quit preaching racism in the name of anti-racism.

I would like to point out that the ultra-radical views of Nasr and Alloush and some of their colleagues are not held by the PFLP leadership, which envisions a single state in Palestine for both Jews and Arabs (see the recent interview with top PFLP leader Leila Khaled, for example).

The view that all Jews coming after 1917 need to take off was recently reiterated by the late Sheik Yassin, spiritual leader of Hamas, who was assassinated by an IDF missile.

Another related view is held by others, including Ayatollah Khameini, spiritual leader of Iran, who has stated that ideally all of those Jews who themselves or whose relatives came to Palestine after the 1948 founding of the Israeli state have to go back where they came from. It is possible that Hezbollah may hold similar views, due to the close relationship of its leadership with that of the Iranian government.

Other Arab radicals say that Mizrachi Jews (Jews who lived in the Arab World) can stay in the region, but that Ashkenazi Jews, who trace their recent ancestry back to Europe, have to go home.

Many anti-Zionists (especially progressives and Leftists) believe that all of the Jews can stay in Israel, but that they must share the state and land with the Arabs and dismantle the Jewish state.

This view has been espoused by the leadership of the DFLP and PFLP leftwing Palestinian armed fronts, some members of the PLO, the Hamas Charter, an Islamic Jihad leader in an interview 13 years ago, and Libya’s Moammar Qaddafi, who proposed a state called Izratine.

This view has been quite popular with Palestinian Christians and secularists like Edward Said, Mazin Qumsiyeh and Ghada Karmi.

In general, the vast majority of anti-Zionists do not advocate killing all the Jews in Israel, though I have heard some Arab hotheads say that on the Internet. No Arab or Muslim armed group (including Al Qaeda) takes that position, to my knowledge.

Yet this is a staple of Zionist propaganda – that all anti-Zionists and armed anti-Israel groups are all intent on “carrying out a second Holocaust”. If it were true, it would be an excellent reason to support Israel, but there is little evidence for this.

Furthermore, there is a question of how killing 5 million Jewish residents of an industrialized society in a rapid manner in our day and age, given recent human historical memory, is even feasible.

That said, I do not think that Al Qaeda or the groups allied with them are good for the Jews, to say the least. I can’t prove they want to kill all of the ones in Palestine, much less all the ones on Earth, but I do not think these radicals have the best interests of the Jewish people at heart, to put it mildly.

The official Al Qaeda line is that after the liberation of Palestine by Islam, all of the Jews will have to leave. According to Al Qaeda, once the Caliphate is established on Muslim lands, all non-Muslims in these lands will have to either convert to Islam if they wish to remain in Caliphate lands, or leave if they do not convert. Those who will not convert or leave will have to be killed.

For the record, some of those associated with the British Al Qaeda fronts Al-Muhajiroun, The Savior Sect and Al Ghurabaa such as Omar Bakri Mohammad and Abu Hamza have made statements that all Jews on Earth must be killed.

Variations on Qaddafi’s one-state solution, described above, are called the one-state project. That is the position of this blog. There are many variations on this view. Some hold that ideally the region should be an Islamic state and that the Jews should have to live under Islamic Law. This position is held by Islamists and is strongly opposed by this blog.

It is interesting that Qaddafi’s Izratine was considered a slap in the face to Hamas, who apparently are not wild about living in a state with 5 million Jews.

Some high-ranking Hamas members have said as much, admitting that they have had enough misery from the Jews in the region and want a “divorce” from the Jews, hence the popularity of 2 states as an interim solution by some high-ranking pragmatists in the Hamas leadership.

Others hold that the single state should be a “secular state”, which is a great idea except that most citizens of such a state would be anything but secular. Many Arabs (especially Arab nationalists) insist that the single state be an Arab state and that Jews should live as a minority in such a state. Obviously, that view is not popular with Jews at all.

Does the two-state solution look feasible to you anymore? Me either. Note how the Separation Wall actually snakes far into the West Bank to include as many Zionist colonies as possible. Note also the Zionist theft of much of the West Bank (in dark green). The logical progression of history is rendering the 2-state solution a complete non-starter.

Others would grant Jews and Arabs some sort of local rule akin to Switzerland’s cantons. One proposal wants to make the single state a homeland for the Jews and Palestinians, two terribly persecuted peoples. This proposal would retain aliya rights for Jews while allowing all Palestinians to have their own sort of aliya.

It’s clear there are many versions of this single state project. The primary resistance to this project at the moment comes not from Arabs or Muslims but from the very real fears of the Jews in Israel. These reality-based fears will have to be addressed in any such single state solution.

As you can see, there is not much left of the 2-state solution, since Zionist colonialism has devoured much of what was to be the Palestinian state. The remaining Palestinian enclaves are nothing more than disconnected bantustans, surrounded by armed Zionist colonies, bases and roads for colonists. It’s like living in a home but being locked in only one room so you could not access the other rooms in the house.

Getting back to Greater Israel, the Internet is full of statements by Zionist fanatics fantasizing about Greater Israel. They are not made-up lies but instead are well-documented statements. Here is one by David Ben-Gurion (formerly David Green):

David Ben Gurion, Report to the World Council of Poale Zion (the forerunner of the Labor Party), Tel Aviv, 1938. Cited by Israel Shahak, Journal of Palestine Studies, Spring 1981.

“We should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria. The weak point is Lebanon, for the Moslem regime is artificial and easy for us to undermine. We shall establish a Christian state there, and then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan; Syria will fall to us. We then bomb and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria, and Sinai.”

Keep in mind that this frighteningly fanatical statement was uttered by the founder of the state of Israel, a socialist, a liberal and a moderate. Note that his rightwing opponents were even more extreme. Note also that his rightwing Revisionist opponents were the forerunners of the modern-day Likud and Kadima Parties, not to mention the many smaller rightwing parties.

From 1890 to 1990, What Has Changed?

Settler colonialism is ongoing in 2012, over a century too late. Shame on the Jews!

Deliberate and Planned Expulsion and Transfer As an Essential Aspect of the Zionist Project

Andyboy, you can’t possibly believe what you write, or if you do, then you are thoroughly and hopelessly brainwashed with lies.

About “transfer,” you know full well that Zionists had been debating and advocating transfer as a *necessity* in the creation of Israel ever since the publication of Der Judenstaat. No transfer, no Israel! Come on now. Herzl himself wrote:

We must expropriate gently the private property on the state assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our country. The property owners will come over to our side.

Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discretely and circumspectly. Let the owners of the immoveable property believe that they are cheating us, selling us things for more than they are worth. But we are not going to sell them anything back.

There is a very long history of such statements dating back to the 1890′s. Whole books have been written documenting them. If you don’t throw the Arabs out, you can’t create Israel! Expulsion and transfer had to be part of the process from the very start. Hence, deliberate and planned expulsion and transfer has been an essential part of the Zionist project from the very beginning.

Andyboy also writes about “the Arabs who chose to stay.” There were no Arabs who chose to stay! There were two types of Arabs in 1947-48:

1. Those who were thrown out.

2. Those who were not thrown out.

Andyboy believes that the Arabs who were not thrown out “chose to stay.” Apparently those who were evicted “chose to leave?”

One reasonable point of view with regard to Zionism would be to say that what’s done was done, the settler-colonial project was an ugly necessity, but it’s over now, and the Israelis are not going to do it anymore. It’s relegated to the past.

But this is not what’s happening! The Zionist settler-colonial project in the region is ongoing as we speak. Confiscation of land and water, destruction of homes, cars and farms, demolition of homes and entire villages, spraying of crops with poison to kill them off, all of this goes on to this very day both inside and outside the Green Line.

So the horrible project never really stopped! If it had stopped in 1948, that would have been bad enough, but here we are in 2012, and Israel is pursuing a 19th century settler-colonial project with no end in sight.

Is Morality Permanent and Inflexible or Temporal and Fluctuating?

Atheist Indian appears to take the philosophical stance that morality is permanent and for all time. The opposite position would be that there is no absolute morality (unfortunately!) but that morality instead is rooted in Time.

I would argue, flexibly, that morality is both absolute (to some extent anyway) and also temporal. That is, while people in the past may have done things that seem deplorable to us, at the time, this was in complete accordance with the morals of the time. So while they sinned, they really didn’t know better.

That is why witch trials and whatnot were unfortunate at the time but would be an utter outrage now, when we ought to know better and learned our lessons so to speak. The people of the past, morally, were as children. We don’t expect kids to embody the morals of a grown man or woman. Kids truly don’t know any better. As we grow and mature as individuals and as cultures, we become “better men” and are hence quite properly held to different standards.

Dota: “The Euro settlers were victims of their time, the Zionists were not. They had a clear moral choice and chose to disregard morality.”

AI: How do you justify that? The Euros had as much choice as the Zionists do. As GSG said, both were indoctrinated to believe that their point of view if just and fair.

The founders of the West were victims of their time because settler-colonialism, the White man’s burden and the need to colonize and pacify savages was in tune with the times.

Settler-colonialism in its most pure form ran out here in the US in the 1890′s. After that, little or no Indian land was stolen. The last Indian War that stole lots of Indian land was in California in 1890. I suppose it has continued and continues in some form in Latin America. One could also argue that it’s ongoing in Indonesia, India and lots of other places where the indigenous are having their lands stolen.

However, the Zionists engaged in settler-colonialism in 1947 in its most brutal form – conquest of the natives, theft of their land and stuff (even their houses and farms!) and on top of that, throwing the natives off the land with no right to come home again.

That’s much worse than was done to the natives even here. Sure, native land was stolen, but we also gave them a lot of free land to live on. If they ever get enough money, they can buy all their stolen land back! A lot of the stolen land was turned to public land, and Indians as well as everyone else can go use it anytime they want to.

Indians around here are not too angry about the stolen land thing. They didn’t have land ownership concepts anyway, so it’s arguable whether we even took it. Many to most Indians today continue to live on or near their ancestral lands, albeit on small lots. They didn’t really get thrown off their land and deposited in some foreign place with no rights to return, so a Palestinian analogy is problematic.

Certain things were products of their times. Columbus, burning witches, on and on, all such things are rooted in their times. It’s much more of a crime to commit these moral transgressions today when we know better and the moral climate is different than it was in the past when the moral weather was a lot cloudier.

At some point, the moral compass must change, and we must draw up new moral laws and a new Moral Disposition of Things. This is right and proper and is in accordance with the Marxist theory that humans move towards progress.

If humans evolve physically, theoretically we should also evolve morally and societally. Onward and upwards is a progressive creed. Only a reactionary says that what was ok in 1490 or 1890 is still ok today. This is one more reason why Zionism is inherently reactionary – the sins of the past are apparently operative for all time, at least as far as Zionists are concerned.

These things rightfully ought to be handled as they would be in a court of law. “But those guys used to do it a long time ago, and they got away with it,” won’t fly with any US judge, and properly so.

Law also exists in temporal space and thankfully not for all time. Like humans and societies, law also evolves, hopefully onwards and upwards if we are progressive people. If not, law reaches back towards an atavistic mirage (See American Constitutionalists and Islamic Sharia Law advocates).

The Assimilation of the Jews As a Progressive Project

I’m not sure what is your definition of “tribalism.” You have a problem with a people seeking to preserve a culture different from yours? Does this problem apply to all nations, races and ethnic group? And if not, why not?

Do you really believe in the “melting pot” principle? It has only partially worked, even in America. And in the rest of the world, Nationalism is a growing force.

Even Scotland is seeking independence from England!

Of course I believe in a melting pot. Minorities in a nation-state must assimilate to some degree to the nation-state, unless they have a valid claim for national liberation. Of course the Jews, scattered to the far winds, had and have no claim to national liberation.

The Jews are not a nation. Lenin and Stalin made this clear. Neither are the Gypsies. Nations without a territory don’t get a state unless someone wants to give them one. Ever since the profoundly damaged Jew emerged from the ghetto after the Liberation of 1812, blinking it’s eyes from emergence from the Dark, the progressive project has been all about the assimilation of the Jew.

This was a big project all through the 19th Century with progressives and Leftists and of types and sorts. An example of this can be seen in Marx’s “On the Jewish Question.”

Unfortunately, the Left has pretty much abandoned this question, although the anti-Israel project is another justified attack on the ghetto Jew (for Israel is just a gigantic ghetto, the biggest ghetto. That this state has aroused such fury worldwide is due its 18th century ghetto nature, not to mention the 19th century settler-colonialism that they have grafted onto it.

The anti-Israel project in its most progressive form then is a part and parcel of the same Jewish Liberation project from the 19th century.

Letting the Jew out of the gates was only the first phase of the project. Let us keep this in mind. Centuries in the ghetto had damaged them badly. A typical 19th century Jew would not eat much less take tea with a non-Jew. Even in the early 20th Century, a proper Orthodox Jew would not make friends with any non-Jew.

This worldview, blown up into a nation-state, is on full view for all in Israel. In short, Israel is an anarchronism, 1812 Jewish ghetto married to 1890′s at latest Western settler-colonialism. It’s a 19th century mysteriously time-travelled into our postmodern 21st Century era.

About the UN’s “Anti-Semitism”

Repost from the old site.

It’s a common trope among Zionists that the UN’s obsession with Israel is an example of how the UN is anti-Semitic and hates Israel. What is the UN? The UN is not some evil Communist or anti-Semitic organization.

It is nothing but an organization of all of the nations of the world, for the most part with a single vote for each one. It is a great exercise in world democracy. If it seems Leftist, Communist or socialist, than maybe that is because most nations on the Earth seem Communist, Leftist or socialist to the person making that statement.

The UN cannot be separated from the states of the world. The states in the UN tend to take stances that are similar to those of their people. If you hate the UN, then you hate the majority of the people of this planet. Are you comfortable with that? Just so we know where you are coming from.

Israel is seriously violating international law with its settlement bullshit, and that is what all the UN opprobrium is all about. Other scofflaws who are also violating International law in a similar manner with regard to settlements and colonization are also regularly slammed in the UN, so it’s not an anti-Semitism thing.

See regular UN votes against Morocco (Spanish Sahara colonization), Indonesia (Papua New Guinea and East Timor colonization) and Turkey (Cyprus colonization).

It is a great thing that settler-colonization, a project existing for most of man’s history, seems to be coming to an end now in the early 21st Century. For this glorious human rights achievement, International Zionism says we, the leading charge of the World Human Rights Movement, an extension of the revolution started in 1814 by Napoleon himself, are a bunch of Nazis!

Keep in mind that most UN states are former colonies, so they don’t like Israel’s ongoing colonization project too much, to put it mildly.