Some Saturday Thoughts on the Jews

A Jewish visitor writes:

Robert:

I’ve read a lot on your blog and I appreciate that you can talk about race, ethnicity, Jewishness, and Zionism without necessarily being racist and anti-Semitic. I think one of the reasons why there is no discourse on Israeli policies in the U.S. is because, as you pointed out, the people who tend to be anti-Zionist also tend to have outright anti-Semitic views, which to us Jews is frightening.

But a few thoughts: when you say “holocaust porn” that’s a little bit offensive. It’s one thing to claim that we still perpetuate a victim mentality despite being successful, but out of respect to the survives and the 5.7 million slain and those who survived, you shouldn’t make a joke of what happened.

When you talk about the influence of Jews in the politico-economic and media spheres, I think what you have to say isn’t too far off, but that the “tribal mentality” and “ethnocentrism” happens on an individual level rather than a group conspiracy. I know a lot of prominent Jews and I can swear there are no secret synagogue meetings in which we malevolently plot to hurt gentiles.

It’s just that from a young age we’ve been taught that yes, we consider ourselves special, and that as a people, we should look out for one another. This may be a form of ethnocentrism, but as you yourself as stated, you take pride in being white, so why shouldn’t we take pride in being Jewish?

I also wonder what your theories as to Jews’ relatedness to the rest of the Caucasian population. Jews suppress white nationalism because it often turns populations against us, and until ’48, we had no place to go.

Ashkenazic Jews look white and resemble their European populations because of intermarriage. But we were told we were “Semitic” and “non-Aryan” and thus non-desirable to White nationalists. Yet recent DNA tests have shown that the Y-chromosomes of Ashkenazic Jews (these lines were generally unbroken) are closest genetically to Greeks and Italians, which maybe hints that we share a common pre-Indo-European (maybe Hittite?) ancestor.

Does this make any sense, and would this mean that Jews should stop advancing our own interests and instead join forces with our fellow white populations? I do think that the sense of Jewish victim mentality is calming with my generation and that besides intermarrying, we’re much cooler-headed on other Jewish issues.

I also read somewhere (maybe on the Occidental Observer) that the Jewish drive and Protestant work ethic have converged in America so that we find ourselves fighting on the same side as our Caucasian brethren against radical Islam and China. So maybe perhaps there is hope for Western Civilization, and perhaps some of that hope lies with the Jews.

First of all, welcome to the site! Jews are always welcome to this website.

As far as his first sentence goes, that’s one of the main things I am trying to do on this site.

Jewish ethnocentrism becomes a problem when they discriminate against non-Jews in hiring, promoting and whatnot. That’s not ok. It’s also pretty sickening that the Jews who helped write the Civil Rights Act tried to make it so Jews could continue to discriminate without running afoul of the Act.

There are some anti-Zionists who are not anti-Semitic, but as they get deeper and deeper into it, many anti-Zionists just get worse and worse that way. Also, anti-Semitic stuff is always infiltrating anti-Zionist sites in all sorts of ways. Of course, the Zionist folks who are acting like such bastards over there are indeed a bunch of Jews, and their crappy behavior is all wrapped up in Judaism and Jewish culture.

Nevertheless, US Jews are not stealing Palestinian land, beating up their kids and whatnot, so why not let them off the hook? Any chance I can get to take the non anti-Semitic side, I will gladly do that. We can blame US Jews for supporting Israel to the hilt, but then many Gentiles are supporting them to the hilt too, so it’s not fair to single out US Jews for this abuse.

Truth is that a lot of countries around the world act just as shitty as Israel, and a lot of their co-ethnics in the US support the crappy behavior of their co-ethnics abroad, so there’s nothing unusual about Jews and their ethnocentrism and tribalism.

One problem with Jewish ethnocentrism is that, in a word, that is what all the horrors of Zionism are all about. Zionism is simply Jewish ethnocentrism writ large and encompassed in an entire state and society. It’s Jewish ethnocentrism on steroids. And the most ethnocentric of US Jews are also the “Jewiest” (the most unpleasant to us Gentiles in their stereotypical ways) and also, surprise, surprise, they are also the most Zionist!

The Y-DNA probably comes from the early migrations of the Israelites after the fall of the temple in 0-500 AD. The first places they went to after leaving Israel were places like Greece and Italy.

My understanding is that there is a also a strong line in the Ashk Jews that is related to Kurds, Turks and Armenians. These are probably the ancient roots of the Jewish people, a Semitic people from northern Iraq. Semitic in language, Anatolian in genes. If you look at Armenian people, you will often notice that they look a lot like Ashk Jews. Look at them closely!

Joining forces with your fellow Whites is probably a good idea. Jews always oppose White interests because they think it will lead to some form of White nationalism or White ethnic nationalism which historically turns on the Jews as aliens and non-Whites or non-ethnics. Certainly Jewish movements against White interests dredge up a whole lot of antisemitism among a certain segment of the population. But one might argue that the type of White who gets so upset about these Jewish behaviors doesn’t like Jews much anyway, and even if Jews stopped their nonsense tomorrow, these ethnocentric Whites would just fish around and find some other reason to hate the Jews.

I really believe that these folks need to hate the Jews for some reason, and I am not sure that there is anything that Jewish people can do to win your favor. At some point, you just have to write certain folks off as lost causes.

The new generation of young Jews is ok. I don’t mind them too much. The problem once again is anti-Semitism. As soon as any significant anti-Semitism gets riled up in US society, those very well-behaved Jews will quickly become the Jewiest Jews you have ever met. Besides being anti-humane, anti-Semitism is bad for the Jews in other ways. It tends to bring out the worst most stereotypical behaviors in Jews, which of course causes even more anti-Semitism, which makes Jews act even Jewier, which causes more anti-Semitism, well, you get the picture. You probably know how this story ends, too, and it’s not a pretty picture.

True the Jews are lining up with White interests somewhat against China and against radical Islam. However, most Jews don’t care about China. Only Jewish neocons want to fight China. And I don’t think most Whites care about China either. Yes there is a marriage of interests against Islam or against radical Islam as you put it, between the Jews and the rest of US Whites. This is not a very pretty marriage though. A lot these folks make no distinction between Islam and radical Islam. To them, all Muslims are radical.

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.

Jewish Militant Thugs Are Destroying Liberal Internet Forums

Repost from the old site.

Update: Since this piece was linked at Whatreallyhappened, we have gotten a lot of traffic coming to read it. Many are asking for the DU censorship rules and the 149 page hate directory referenced in the post below.

It is due to the psychopaths in the Jewish Israeli Lobby that America has gotten so wrapped up in the Middle East as a supporter of the KKK-Jews in Israel and their criminal wars in the region.

Some question whether the Israeli Lobby is really a Jewish Lobby, pointing to Christian Zionist support for Israel. True, Christian Zionists do support Israel, but they do little political lobbying for Israel, and this is what it is all about (see this article by Jeff Blankfort, who is Jewish, or really any article by him, for more. Blankfort is the Pope of the Anti-Jewish Lobby Crowd).

The Israeli Lobby is all about Jewish money, and I mean Big Jewish Money, not Joe Finkelstein, the librarian down the street, giving $25. Only 2% of the US population, Jews make up 25-30% of its wealthiest members.

That’s no reason to hate Jews. Even if you hate the rich ones, what do they have to do with Joel Cohen, the small businessman next door? Nothing. He’s not a member of the Jewish Millionaires Club, and they don’t give him a check.

Jewish money (generally meant to mean Big Jewish Money) is 60% of Democratic Party money and 35% of Republican Party money. Money talks and bullshit walks. Big Jewish Money is so powerful in US party politics that they are able to dictate the terms on various issues – in particular, US foreign policy in the Middle East (read: unstinting support for the KKK-Jewish state of Israel).

Jewish domination of our media is quite helpful too in furthering the aims of the Jewish Lobby. If anyone bucks the Jewish Lobby, the heavily-Jewish media can be counted on to massacre the miscreants in the press. As the media has the power of life and death over US politicians, most US politicians live in terror of bucking the Jewish Lobby and getting creamed by Lobby journalists in the press.

There is ample evidence that when US politicians buck the Lobby, the Lobby’s press members go to work on them. The result typically is the destruction of the politician or a serious drop in his poll numbers.

Jewish control over the US media was initiated via a conspiracy that took place from about 1890-1920 in the US. At the time, the US media was largely in the hands of Gentiles, many of whom were savage White Gentile racists (See the movie Birth of the Nation for an idea of their mindset).

At the time, there was some serious Jewish money consolidating in the US, mostly back East, while at the same time, most US Jews were terribly poor and living in de facto ghettos, also mostly back East.

This poverty, incidentally, is what gave rise to the Jewish role in the US Left and Labor Movement. While other ethnics may just grin and bear it when exposed to capitalist hyperexploitation, US Jews took offense to being downtrodden proletarians and organized to do something about it. Subsequent generations of Jews never forgot their impoverished origins and have remained on the liberal-Left.

The Jewish role on the US Left gave it a shot in the arm, for which all of us on the Left will be forever in debt to the Jews.

Anyway, during this 1890-1920 period, there were some important meetings with some of the very wealthy Jews that were emerging on the East Coast. They were concerned about the US press being in the hands of racist Gentiles. Logically, they feared that this press would be used to harm the Jews. In order to protect US Jews from anti-Semitism, these wealthy Jews resolved to try to acquire as much US newspaper media as possible.

Thus the New York Times ended up in the hands of the Ochs-Sulzbergers, and there it has stayed ever since. A corollary of Jewish ethnic warfare is that once a business interest is in Jewish hands, it must remain in Jewish hands – that is, it is not to be sold to the Gentiles. If it must be sold, it needs to be sold to other Jews, thereby remaining “Jewish property”.

Since Gentiles lack ethnic solidarity and will typically just sell to the highest bidder, Gentile or Jewish, with time, more and more Gentile interests will be sold to the Jews and few or no Jewish interests will be sold to the Gentiles. This has been one of the Dirty Little Secrets of the Jews for a long time now.

By 1920, a significant portion of the US media was in Jewish hands. The percentage seems to have only increased since then as Jews initiated and consolidated a hold over TV news and newsmagazines. The mechanisms underlying Jewish domination of US broadcast news and newsmagazines are obscure and warrant further research.

Domination of broadcast news may have been ancillary to general Jewish domination of Hollywood, which took place from 1900-1920, via another conspiracy of a few very wealthy Ukrainian-Polish Jews. Like the Jews who tried to grab the newspapers, the ones who nabbed Hollywood were motivated by fears of Gentile racism in the movie industry.

During this period, some US Gentile moviemakers were making some very racist movies (see the reference to Birth of a Nation above) and this deeply worried these Jews. And thus a plot was hatched to grab Hollywood in order to safeguard the Jews.

When TV came online, Jews were a widespread force in Hollywood and members of this group probably moved into the nascent TV industry and dominated it also.

In 1983, an authoritative Jewish source placed the percentage of the US media elite who were Jewish at 60%. It’s probably only increased since then. Even accounting for higher Jewish IQ, there is absolutely no way that 2% of the population could acquire 60% of the media elite based on IQ alone. Jewish ethnic warfare must account for quite a bit of this domination.

Now that we have postulated, proven and explicated Jewish domination of the US media, we can understand why US politicians live in terror of this media.

And it is time to move on to the more mundane realities of the Jewish Lobby, such as the work of the Jewish Lobby on the Internet. While discussing the Jewish Lobby, it is useful, just to head off the usual Jewish Swarm Attack, to question just what percentage of US Jews we are talking about here.

About 30% of all US Jews are politically active in Jewish politics. The other 70% have better things to do with their time.

Interestingly, about 20% of US Jews, mostly the liberal-Left, are pretty much cut off from their increasingly sickening and reactionary Organized Community. These Jews have little attachment to Israel, are not passionate about Jewish issues, and would rather worry about their love lives and their bills than anti-Semitism. A number of them are actively hostile to Organized Jewish politics. Others are just apathetic.

During Israeli wars, such as the recent Lebanon War, many of this 20% will emerge from hibernation and start supporting Israel.

Just how many of the Zionist and pro-Jewish Internet furies are Gentiles? Observation tells us not many are, although there are a large number of US Gentile neoconservative bloggers who are passionately pro-Israel.

Which brings us to the topic of the day – the role of the Jewish Lobby on US liberal websites. I had always assumed that such sites as the Democratic Underground and the Liberal Underground were relatively free of the feverish slanders of the Lobby and its foot soldiers. Turns out I was wrong.

I recently received some correspondence from a man who was quickly banned from both DU and LU for challenging the reigning Zionist Paradigm on these liberal sites. I will let him speak with his own words here:

A year ago I joined the forum Liberal Underground. I don’t dwell on the Israeli/Palestinian issue because it’s not something that dominates my priorities – the Iraq war and labor are my pet issues (I protested in DC ’05) – but I saw a group of pro-Zionist campaigners with an obvious agenda in the forum, squatting like basilisks with tongues at the ready, really distorting the facts whenever Israel came up, and since there was no dissenting opinions rising to the challenge I took them on.

I was very soon labeled an anti-Semite and banned. All I did was state the facts. This was an education for me.

About a month ago I joined the forum Democratic Underground and in the Israeli/Palestinian forum I found the same thing going on, a sort of propaganda campaign to put Israel in the best light and the Palestinians in mud, so I politely and firmly contradicted the nonsense with backed-up facts.

Here again I was called an anti-Semite and banned. I realized that I’d been baited into violating some very strict and narrow rules applying to that forum. A violation of these rules will get you banned:

• No links to Whatreallyhappened or any sites on an Internet hate site list that’s 149 pages long.
• No posting that AIPAC (or other Jewish orgs) exercises undue influence in Congress or on our foreign policy.
• No saying that the attack on the USS Liberty was deliberate.
• No calling someone a “blind supporter” of Israel, a conservative, or an Israeli-apologist.

I posted an article by Charlie Reese, one of my favorite columnists who’s critical of Israel’s policies and the Iraq war, by way of LewRockwell.com, and the post was deleted with the warning that LewRockwell was a bigoted site and Reese a rightwing conservative, both unsupportable claims IMO.

Reese has some conservative views, but in many ways he’s on the left and progressive. Labels don’t work with him.

The restrictions I listed are accurate and spelled-out in the forum rules, and are also based on comments made by the forum moderator (Lithos).

I don’t see how any meaningful, useful debate can take place under these restrictions, and what’s too bad is that DU is one of the largest and most active boards on the net. Oh well.

Then I discovered a site called Prosemiteundercover. It’s made up of banned and active members of both Liberal Underground and DU, along with Israelis, and their gig is to read, post and archive every anti-Zionist, Israel-critical post on sites like DU, then go on an e-mail campaign to alert and complain to the mods and demand the posts be deleted and the poster banned.

They participate under different usernames and bait the posters that are critical of Israel, hoping to goad them into a hot response that’ll get them banned.

This kind of covert intellectual Jihadism can definitely contribute to mistrust and resentment of pro-Israel Jews in general. But your take is correct IMO, the majority of Jews are reasonable and straightforward, you just have this fanatical and mendacious minority that suffer from cognitive dissonance and anger issues who exercise a disproportionate influence on public discourse and effectively poison the atmosphere.

While anti-Israel criticism on Liberal U. is non-existent in the face of the Israel-firster squatters, on DU in the Israeli/Palestinian forum there is criticism, but it’s restricted to following a narrow and channelized corridor.

And the inability to bring up a range of subjects, facts and events that are inter-related to honest criticism of Israel hog-ties open discussion. Some stridently pro-Israel posters at DU have had their posts deleted and been banned for straying outside the strict rules themselves, many of them landing at Prosemiteundercover.

This might be merely an attempt by the mod there (Lithos) and the Skinner to maintain the appearance of neutrality, but the fact remains that the majority of banned posters and deleted comments are from those critical of Israel, and the Prosemiteundercover (and doubtless other) e-mails and alerts are still read and obviously acted upon by the mod and admin.

As you can see, the Jewish Lobby has total control over DU and LU and God knows how many other good liberal forums. There’s an active Jewish conspiracy driving all of it, as we suspected, involving a Jewish site - Prosemiteundercover – that archives all anti-Israel posts and then organizes campaigns to get the poster banned on spurious and phony grounds.

A good overview of the nonsense involving PSU and DU is here, on a decent site called the Progressive Independent. It appears that the DU is run by a guy named Skinner, who is a Democratic Party guy with a capital D. The US Democratic Party is bizarrely, insanely pro-Israel (due to the Big Jewish Money described above) and this rhetorical straitjacket in the party is mirrored on DU.

Furthermore, the Jewish militants conspire to try to provoke the poster into making overtly racist remarks out of anger – the ultimate goal being to get someone to scream KIKE or some such epithet, a tactic I observed countless militant Usenet Jews engaging in. As soon as they provoke the person into making the racist remark, they pummel them for being “racist”.

Then the worms archive the post for all time in their files and bring it up endlessly to try to permanently destroy the person’s reputation.

There are lots of folks around the world who have gotten pretty good at Dirty Politics, and the Jews are surely counted among the best. After some time in Middle East fora on Usenet, I arrived at the conclusions that Jews were the finest propagandists in the world. I also concluded that I had never met a more flagrantly dishonest group of humans than these Jews.

Just a couple of observations that rumbled through my mind at the time – not trying to make any scientific proofs here.

The conspiracy is working very well, as DU and LU are still under the death-grip of the Jewish Lobby. The Moral Left has a duty to take back these sites from these Jewish psychopaths, or, if not, to resign itself to the reality that US liberalism is morally bankrupt.

“My Jewish Problem”

Repost from the old site.

My Jewish Problem is a superb article by one of my favorite Jewish writers, Philip Weiss. Weiss writes a lot about Jews in contemporary America, and his views on that subject are taboo-shattering and groundbreaking.

For instance, he has written about Jewish media, monetary and political power in America and the ways in which the behavior of US Jews (especially the ban on all criticism of this group) is producing a groundswell of dammed-up rage amongst ordinary, non-racist US Gentile officer-worker types. In other words, how US Jews are creating anti-Semitism.

This brief article sums up much of my views of, problems with and critiques of US Jewry.

It explains well the paradox of the Jewish neocons’ and the Jewish elite’s hardline support for Israel and the Iraq War, which is juxtaposed, strangely, with the continuing liberalism of US Jews, as shown in surveys that continue to poll Jews as the most liberal ethnic group in the US (about 37% are liberals).

It also explains why Zionist Jews are complaining that the Left has become anti-Semitic, and it shows how the rightwing, neoconservative behavior of the Jewish elite is causing much of the world’s Left to feel distant, alienated and cynical towards the Jews, not to mention outright hostile.

I think he misses the point in places. For instance, he discusses how almost the entire sweep of the Jewish political and journalistic elite supported the Iraq War, from Jewish liberals to Jewish conservatives, and he uses this fact to try to demonstrate that Jews have become much more conservative and cannot really be considered a liberal group anymore.

Yet at the same time, I think only around 57% of Jews supported the war, one of the lower rates around. Within months, that figure was down below 50%, where it has stayed ever since.

I think the real disconnect here is between the Jewish power elite – political, journalistic and organizational – which can be called neoconservative in at least some ways – and the disaggregated, depoliticized masses of US Jewry at large – the Jews you meet on the street and at the coffee shop, who are far less neoconservative, far more antiwar, and far more liberal on foreign policy than their own elite.

I slam the ordinary Jews for not speaking up against their idiot leaders, but as crimes go, it’s not so serious. Anyway, Michael Lerner’s Tikkun Magazine plays this very role to some extent. The nonsense stereotypes that characterize US Jews in general as either passionate pro-Israeli activists or raging neoconservatives or (more typically) both, are unfair and not moored in reality.

But the Jewish elite is exactly that.

How a community’s elite became so disconnected with the community itself is more the story here, one that needs to be written up more than the trite summaries that try to unwrap these sociological jungles into nice little mathematical-like theories that claim to sum it all up while reducing our anxiety about concepts we find it hard to get our brains around. How’s that for a sentence?

Read it and enjoy. Check out the comments too, where the usual suspects who come out of the woodwork for any such piece are on display – like-minded Jewish leftists and liberals, Jewish Zionist activists who viciously attack Philip as a self-hating Jew (I wonder how painful that must feel to a Jew?) and anti-Semitic nutballs.

Especially note the mental gymnastics on display in the comments of Kei and Yuri of to the audient void, a brilliant but difficult little blog.

One of my favorite web pages by Harry Clark mines this same ore very well. Check it out, especially the brief notes titled US Jews Mostly Bankrupt, Jewish Contribution to Rightwing Politics and Ideology and Progressive Judaism. Great stuff.

Now that I think about it, Phil Weiss’s My Jewish Problem is my own Jewish problem, too.

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.

Mitt Romney: President of “USreal”?

Is Mitt Romney running for President of the US or for President of Israel? It’s a good question.

Romney’s presidency would be the Bush Administration rebooted on foreign policy. His foreign policy team is straight out of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) the US imperialist-Zionist ultraright neoconservative project that plotted the war in Iraq and other foreign policy catastrophes. It’s also full of the dual loyalty crowd, people who are hardly even real Americans: Israeli-American dual citizens.

Partial list of Romney’s foreign policy team.

Cofer Black – (BlackWater USA, neoconservative, fundamentalist Christian, imperial mercenary and all around criminal)
Dov Zakheim – (Israeli Dual Citizen and prominent neoconservative)
Robert Kagan – (Israeli Dual Citizen and prominent neoconservative intellectual)
Michael Chertoff – (Israeli Dual Citizen, prominent neocon and head of Homeland Security)

Eliot Cohen – (Israeli Dual Citizen and prominent neoconservative intellectual)
Eric Edelman – (Israeli Dual Citizen)
John Lehman – (Israeli Dual Citizen)
Evan Feigenbaum – (Israeli Dual Citizen)
Aaron Friedberg – (Israeli Dual Citizen)
Kent Lucken – (Israeli Dual Citizen)
Kristen Silverberg – (Israeli Dual Ctizen)

Norm Coleman (Jewish)
Dan Senor (Jewish neoconservative )
Jim Talent (descended from Russian Jewish immigrants)
Pierre Prosper (An anti-racist nut. Member of ICERD – wants to make “hate speech” and “membership of racist organizations” a crime)
Vin Weber (Member of PNAC – The group calling for “another pearl harbor.”)

Countering Lies About Hezbollah

Repost from the old site.

Ever since the Lebanon War last summer between Hezbollah and Israel, much nonsense has been written about this organization, much of it from Zionists and US imperialists in the press. It is time for a rational overview.

Lie: Hezbollah is the puppet of Iran and Syria.

Not true! Is Israel the puppet of the US? Well, the US supports Israel, right? Despite the US support, Israel is not the puppet of the US. Israel does what it damned well wants. Well, yes, Hezbollah gets support from Syria and Iran, but they don’t take orders from them anymore than Israel takes orders from America.

In truth, Hezbollah does what it wants. Iran was probably informed before Hezbollah started this war, but that’s about it. And Hezbollah’s autonomy from Syria is well-documented. Syria uses Hezbollah to keep up the pressure on Israel, not because they want to kill all the Jews, like insane Zionists insist, but because they want the Golan Heights back.

Iran supports Hezbollah in order to support Shia power in the region, and because Hezbollah’s leadership supports the Iranian revolution and because Iran hates Israel.

Lie: The Lebanon War was started by Iran to take the heat off its nuclear program.

Not true! It looks like Hezbollah started the war on its own in order to try to win back some Lebanese that Israel has been holding captive for a long time.

But they had no idea that the war would go this way. They thought it would just be a few days of shelling back and forth and then they would get down to some hard bargaining. They were totally taken by surprise by Israel’s response.

Lie: Hezbollah “started the war”.

Well, yes, Hezbollah conducted a cross-border raid, killed and wounded some Israelis, then grabbed some captives and took them back to Lebanon.

But to place all of the responsibility for the resulting war in which Israel destroyed Lebanon is insane. Israel’s wild response was part of a war that they had been planning for over a year, in concert with the US, and the war was conducted by both the US and Israel.

In fact, Ehud Olmert has recently given testimony in Israel that he had been planning this war for months along with the neocons in the Bush Administration. The Israeli military already had advanced plans for this war that they had developed with Ariel Sharon.

The neocons were trying to use the war against Hezbollah as an excuse to attack Syria, but Israel would not take the bait. They wanted to go after Hezbollah’s main backer, Iran. Since Iran could not be hit itself, the second best option was to go after Syria. The apparent purpose was to weaken Iran’s allies Syria and Hezbollah prior to an attack on Iran itself.

This explains why both the US and Israel have been refusing to deal with Syria’s increasingly desperate efforts to negotiate a settlement on the Golan Heights (Syria is even willing to turn the Golan into a “peace park” and give Israelis free access to visit it.

Since this war, logically, Syria has been edgy, and has been building up its forces along the border with Israel. But in the crazy paranoid Israeli mindset, this is seen as Syria preparing for a (in my opinion, an obviously suicidal) war with Israel. Even the distinguished Martin Van Creveld, Israel’s top military historian, has bought into this nonsense.

What will stop the upcoming Syrian war? Let’s ask Van Creveld. Only a US attack on Iran. What will hasten it? A US withdrawal from Iraq and a US refusal to attack Iran. We can see the twisted Israeli thinking. If the US does what Israel wants, the nonexistent war can be prevented. If the US acts against Israel’s wishes in the region, the fake war can be prevented.

Lie: Hezbollah is an insane terrorist group that is dedicated to killing all the Jews.

Jews just love this one, since so many of them are afflicted with a paranoid-masochistic character that just eats this stuff up. It’s not true.

Hezbollah is not opposed to a Jewish state, they just don’t like that Jews stole Palestine, which they did. Lebanon is a Lebanese nationalist organization. They mobilized to fight Israel when Israel annexed South Lebanon. Ten years of guerrilla war won it back for Hezbollah and Lebanon and Hezbollah were the heroes of Lebanese nationalists.

Hezbollah is now fighting to get back the Shebaa Farms, Lebanese land that Israel occupies and refuses to give back to Lebanon on some very phony grounds. They have also made some noises about three or four Lebanese Shia villages that Israel conquered, ethnically cleansed and annexed in the 1948 War.

Many of the people in the South, where many Palestinians live in refugee camps, and people have lived through numerous conflicts with Israel, really hate Israel, and understandably so. So here for an overview of the people’s views of Israel.

Hezbollah has said that if the Palestinians accept Israel for a Palestinian state, Hezbollah will stand by that. Unfortunately, Hezbollah’s leaders have made some lamentable anti-Semitic remarks and it is disgusting that they call one of their missiles “Khaibar” in reference to the Khaibar tribe of Jews who had their men killed and their women enslaved by Mohammad.

Lie: Hezbollah are radical fundamentalist Muslims, like Al Qaeda.

Not so! At the beginning, Hezbollah laid down Islamic Law in south Lebanon but over time they found that it was not going over well, so since 1990 or so, they have lifted most of their restrictions.

At the time, Hezbollah banned alcohol and forced women to wear headcovers. Both of those bans have now been lifted by Nasrallah. However, Hezbollah still arrests homosexuals and turns them over the Lebanese police, since I believe that homosexuality is illegal in Lebanon. They may beat some of them too.

The Shia in particular seem to take a hard line against homosexuality, as the Iranian regime and the Iraq Shia have really persecuted gay men. The Iranians mostly beat them up, harass them and send them to jail for short stays. The Iraqi Shia have also been beating them, but apparently they have also killed quite a few gay men.

The Shia doing this include the Dawa and SCIRI parties that the US supports in Iraq. Hezbollah’s supporters include many liberated females, I saw a video on Youtube of Lebanese women without hijabs driving a car and smoking cigarettes, then doing a belly dance, all the while saying how they supported Hezbollah.

Hezbollah rallies have included quite a few beautiful young women without hijabs, and many have been dressed racily. Josh Landis tells of how during the Lebanese Civil War, when Hezbollah took over a district, they imposed Islamic Law, but it went over so poorly that they soon rescinded most of it.

Lie: Well, at least Iran is a radical fundamentalist state like Al Qaeda.

Nor is Iran. Women have many more rights in Iran than they do in the Gulf. The dress code is loosely adhered to and the religious police no longer bother mixed couples. Fredericks of Hollywood stores dot Tehran.

Middle class and upper middle class young people are engaging in lots of promiscuous sex and not much is being done to stop them. One of Iran’s top race car drivers is a woman. There are many women in Parliament and most or all professions are open to women. Compare to Saudi Arabia where only 5% or so of women are even employed.

Alcohol, marijuana and especially opium are widely consumed at parties and not much is done about that. Prostitution is widespread, especially in the religious city of Qom, where they serve the religious students. There, throngs of young women meet men and go before mullahs to get a temporary marriage in order to have sex.

The temporary marriage is merely a cover for prostitution. There is so much prostitution in Tehran that the religious leadership has suggested having official houses for them, all under the banner of temporary marriage. The religious leadership has also recognized transsexualism and one of the top mullahs is a transsexual.

Temporary marriage is widespread, and a famous Iranian female parliamentarian has had sexual relationships with many men, including top mullahs, under this rubric and has written about it. Also, Iran is much more democratic than most of the Sunni regimes, and this is one of the things that the Sunni regimes fear most about Iran.

Supporters of this theory can always come up with this or that atrocity to demonstrate how Iran is an Al Qaeda-like state, but the truth is more complicated than that.

Lie: Hezbollah has savagely persecuted the Israeli-backed South Lebanese Army.

After Israel’s withdrawal in 2000, most people expected that there would be widespread paybacks for the South Lebanese Army (most of whom were Shia, not Maronites as it is commonly thought.

In fact, after Israel withdrew, Hezbollah issued a directive forbidding any attacks on the South Lebanon Army members, many of whom just went home. Quite a few others defected over to Israel.

That’s pretty amazing, considering that the French Resistance executed 10,000 “traitors” during World War 2. It’s also highly untypical behavior for a “terrorist” group.

Lie: Hezbollah is a terrorist group.

Well, for the most part it is a Lebanese resistance organization, and the vast majority of its attacks are against Israeli military targets.

It’s true that during the war, they fired rockets at Israeli cities and killed some civilians, but many of those attacks were actually aimed at strategic targets like arms factories and military bases that Israel cynically put right in the middle of Arab towns, so that if they enemy attacked, they would kill a lot of Arabs by accident.

On the other hand, Israel killed far more civilians in this war, and somehow avoided the “terrorist” label. Isn’t that kind of unfair?

Lie: Hezbollah and Iran are out to kill or convert all the Sunnis and then attack and kill or convert all the infidels in a world war, after which everyone will be a Shia Muslim.

I could not believe that people actually believed that one, but I heard a number of (mostly) Zionists and US imperialists repeating this bit of Sunni paranoia.

On the Sunni conversion, see here. On the rest of it, forget it. Shia is the nigger of the (Muslim) World. The relationship between Sunni and Shia is similar to that between Whites and Blacks during the Jim Crow South, with the Sunnis being the Whites and Shia being the Blacks.

The notion of Shia takeover is similar to fantasies of poor downtrodden Blacks taking over the South, or America. In Lebanon, the Shia say that the Sunnis used to only let them work as garbage collectors. Shia youngsters were routinely taunted and attacked by Sunni gangs in Beirut in the 1970′s.

Lie: Hezbollah gets Iranian money for schools and hospitals to brainwash Lebanese into supporting the terrorists.

No! The reason they do this is because to this day, the bigoted Lebanese government that the US supports provides almost zero money whatsoever for any kind of development whatsoever in South Lebanon.

This is the reality of Lebanon, and its always been this way. Someone has to do it, the government won’t, so Hezbollah steps in. Good for them!

Lie: Hezbollah is trying to take over Lebanon to make a fundamentalist Islamic state there.

Well, that is their stated intention. In the early days, they may have believed it.

In recent statements, Nasrallah has said that an Islamic state is only possible in Lebanon if the “vast majority”, meaning over 80% or so, or people support it. That is not likely any time in the near future, so the project is all but written off. Hezbollah is reckoning itself to Lebanese reality.

Lie: Lebanese Christians are poor, downtrodden and horribly persecuted by Muslims.

Nonsense. In fact, they have always run the country! This lie is spread by some of the Maronite fascists. In the late 1950′s, Marines landed in Lebanon to help preserve an election that the Christians stole.

The real cause of the Civil War was the Muslims wanting a fairer share of the pie that the Christians had unfairly dominated for far too long. The Christians are being forced to concede some of their excess power in Lebanon (though they still have most of the money and much of the political power) and this is why some of the Maronites are wailing so much about “persecution”.

Lie: The Lebanon War last year was between Israel and a group of terrorists called Hezbollah. Most other Lebanese were not involved or opposed Hezbollah.

As you can see here, Israel was fighting much more than Hezbollah in South Lebanon.

In the Battle of Aita Al Shaab, most of the village fought against Israel, under the leadership of Hezbollah, true, but most fighters were just “local militia” who were not actually Hezbollah fighters. Further, there was quite a bit of fighting from members of the Lebanese Communist Party. The Amal militia fought against Israel too.

Truth is, Israel was essentially fighting a war against the people of South Lebanon. It’s true that a certain amount of that resistance was Hezbollah, but much of it was just local militia fighting for their homes and towns.

In the town of Marjayoun, during the Civil War the headquarters of the pro-Israeli South Lebanon Army, Israel came under attack soon after they entered the town by members of Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP). Most of the members of this party are Greek Orthodox.

In fact, it may be the most popular political party among Lebanese Greek Orthodox. In the Sunni villages, the local Muslim Brotherhood and another fundamentalist group organized an armed resistance.

Furthermore, 80-90% of Lebanese supported Hezbollah during the war, including 80% of Christians. The sickening US media deliberately lied about this, making much of the tiny minority of Lebanese who opposed Hezbollah, acting like they were the majority, and trying to portray the country as “divided”.

Lie: Hezbollah forces salute using “Nazi salutes”, so that means that Hezbollah idolizes and Nazis and wants to kill all the Jews just like Nazis did.

Much is made of this on Zionist and rightwing blogs and even in the mainstream press. See here and here for two examples. For more examples, see here, here and here.

In the last example, written by a militant Jewish Zionist named Lewis Loflin, although the photo on the right is of Hezbollah forces giving a “Nazi salute”, the photo on the right, which he states is of a Hamas fighter giving the Nazi salute, is actually of a PFLP fighter.

You can tell it is a PFLP fighter by the characteristic red headband and the poster and Ahmed Sa’adat, the present leader of the PFLP. Many people say that the PFLP is dead, but it is interesting how a dead organization could afford full uniforms, headbands, posters and automatic weapons.

This blog strongly supports the PFLP, and as leftists, I assure you that the mainstream PFLP does not like Nazis one bit.

The fact is that the “Nazi salutes used by Hezbollah fighters” is propaganda.

This is a type of salute which was originally known as the “Roman salute”. It has a fascinating history, and was widely used by many countries before World War II. Under the name “Bellamy salute” or “flag salute”, it used to be usual salute used when saying the US Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of the United States. A photo of the Bellamy salute is here.

From Wikipedia:

Because of the similarity between the Bellamy salute and the Nazi salute, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt instituted the hand-over-the-heart gesture as the salute to be rendered by civilians during the Pledge of Allegiance and the national anthem in the United States, instead of the Bellamy salute.

The association with Nazism has been so strong that the salute has rarely been used by non-Nazi organizations since the end of World War II. There are several exceptions; one is the Republic of China (Taiwan), where the salute is still used during the swearing of oaths in inaugurations.

The salute is also still used by some Palestinian militant groups. It is also known to be used by the Tamil separatist organization, the LTTE, while saluting their leader Velupillai Prabhakaran.

Lie: Hezbollah does not support Israel’s right to exist and therefore they want to wipe it off and map and kill all 5.1 million Jews there in the process.

Embedded in this clever argument is the notion that any nation or regime has any kind of inherent right to exist.

Did colonies and empires and occupied territories have a right to exist too? The very notion that any nation-state on Earth has some kind of a rock-solid “right” to exist is strange and counter-intuitive.

Sure, humans have a right to get together and make nations out of mapped out geographical parcels, but why does that mean that that nation has some kind of a laid in tone specific right to exist?

The fact is that throughout history, nations, empires and colonies have come and gone. The ones that no longer exist had no greater or lesser right to exist than any existing state does.
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Meanwhile, the US has initiated a very controversial plan to counter Shia influence in the region. The plan is being coordinated with Saudi Arabia, specifically Prince Bandar, who has a longstanding relationship with US Administrations, and possibly the Jordanian government, especially Jordanian intelligence.

They are working to arm and build up the pro-US Siniora government and stoke sectarianism in Lebanon.

Part of this plan, outrageously, has involved money given by the US, via the Siniora regime, to three Sunni Salafist groups who are pro-Al Qaeda. These groups are being armed in order to fight Hezbollah (since they loathe Shiites). If push comes to shove between Hezbollah and the Lebanese government, these groups will be used to battle it out with Hezbollah.

Outrageously, the US is once again funding Al Qaeda, which shows that imperialism truly has no morals at all. See The Seymour Hersch’s The Redirection in the latest New Yorker magazine (video here).

The Saudis are racists who hate the Shia and want to keep them down. In fact, most of the Sunni Arab regimes are like this. They all look to the Ottoman Empire when the Sunnis ruled the roost and the Shia were kept down by force. This is the Sunni Jim Crow era that they long for.

It is outrageous that the US is supporting Sunni Jim Crow racism against the downtrodden Shia and it is particularly despicable that the Israeli Jews, considering the history of the Jews, are supporting the oppressor against the oppressed. Or maybe that is what Israel is all about?

Morality Differs Not Only Temporally But Also Spatially

Tulio writes

I’m starting to come to the belief that morality is just a man-made construct based in creating a system of rules that allow society to function efficiently. We believe something is moral as long as it makes sense. If it stops making sense, that belief will eventually weaken and then diminish. In addition, right and wrong are often just a matter of what makes people feel good, and what makes people feel good obviously varies from culture to culture and even within different times within the same culture.

I wish there was an objective morality that stood outside of time and culture, but there doesn’t seem to be.

Temporal = time. In this case, I would argue that Tulio is using culture to mean space.

There are two things we want to know.

1. Is morality constant over time? We discussed that in a previous post. The general consensus is that morality changes over time in various ways. As a Marxist and a believer in human progress, I would like to believe that our systems of morality evolve upwards through time, but maybe that’s not always so.

and

2. Is morality constant across space? That is, does it differ not only depending on what period of time you are talking about, but also depending on what part of the globe you happen to be standing on?

I agree with Tulio. It does seem that morality differs through time and space. What was wrong at one time is seen as no big deal now. What seems horrific to us now was seen as nothing back in the day.

And you can go to different places on the globe where a certain type of behavior will be seen as immoral at the least and possibly even illegal. You can move to a different spot on the globe, and not only is it legal, but no one even gives a flying fuck whether you do it or not.

That morality differs across space is not an evolutionary argument as we are looking at something that is fixed in time, and evolution needs the prism of time. However, moral systems that differ across space do influence each when they come in contact with each other.

In general, Culture A argues that Culture B is behaving immorally. Culture A petitions Culture B to revise its moral system towards improved morality. We see many examples of this in the world today. In general, it’s the West lecturing non-Western cultures, especially in the Muslim world, that their moral system is messed up.

One could even argue that the neoconservative regime change argument runs along these lines. Dictatorships are seen as immoral systems that need the military force of the West, imbued with the higher morality of democracy, to bomb and strafe them into better behavior by toppling the dictator and instituting democratic rule.

“We Are All Jews Now,” or the Reasons for the Iraq War

Gay State Girl wrote:

I don’t know why they identify the Iraq war as an exclusively Jewish war. There certainly were Jewish policy makers pulling the strings behind the war, but Jewish politicians, reporters, and entertainers were also among the first outspoken critics of the Iraq war.

Less than 1/4 of American Jews believed it was a good idea. It has effectively been tarred as a Jewish war, and those who believe that are not open to debate. In a way, white gentiles are lucky that Jews dominated the West in its last hour: The blame will ultimately go to those in power.

Neoliberalism, Globalization, secularization, neocolonialism, Radicalism and perversion of traditional values could have all been achieved with white gentiles in power and many rich white gentiles seem eager to jump on the bandwagon or at least cash in on it.

Jewish support for the war on the day of the war was around 58%, but it dropped below 50% shortly after. Nevertheless, the powerful Jews in the US, the money Jews and hardline US Zionism was in back of the war 100%+. For instance the major US Jewish organizations supported the war at the time and probably do to this day.

I read Israeli and Jewish papers in the run-up to the war, and 100% of them supported the war. A good source for hardline Zionism is Debka.com. It’s more or less run by the Mossad or former Mossad agents. I can’t even put into words the intensity with which Debka was pushing for that war. Debka is pretty much the voice of hardline national security Zionism in Israel.

I was on Usenet in Jewish and Israeli Usenet groups, and there was not a single Jewish person who was not pushing the war. And at the time, I was trying to sell a book written by a top official in Saddam’s regime that said there were no weapons of mass destruction. A lot of people were interested in the book. Two of the agents I talked to were violently, I mean violently opposed to the book. Both were Jewish.

Radical Zionists in both the US and Israel were some of the major people pushing the war. The sausage factory cooking up fake evidence was run out of Ariel Sharon’s office. After the US invaded Iraq, Sharon said, “Good, now invade Syria, Libya, Iran and a few other countries.” Israeli military officers and intelligence officers were deeply involved with the neocon group in the Executive Branch that was cooking up the war. All of the major US Jewish organizations were behind the war. The big money Jews were all behind the war.

Jews were some of the loudest and most belligerent voices promoting the war. Thomas Friedman wrote that the war was cooked up in Washington and Tel Aviv by 25 people, most of them Jewish.

That said, the US Right was totally behind the war for a very long time, since the last war really (and this was the principal reason for the war). That radical Zionism was also for the war was more a marriage of convenience than anything else. The US Right has now been taken over by neocons, and most of the US Right are White Gentiles. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush, etc. were all pushing this war for a very long time, and Bush did not attack Iraq for Israel! He ain’t that stupid. He did it for his own reasons.

Bush and the leaders of the US Republican Party and rightwing were discussing plans to attack Iraq before Bush even took office. As soon as Bush took office, many people in his administration argued for attacking Iraq. It was something Bush always wanted to do anyway. Saying that the dirty Jews talked the dumb goy Bush into attacking Iraq for the Jews is stupid. These guys are not that dumb. He was going to do it anyway.

Sure, helping Israel was part of the prize, but it wasn’t the main reason. The US does not march off into major wars in the Middle East solely to benefit Israel. I am not sure if we have ever done so. However, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush are all deeply tied in with far rightwing Zionism, such as JINSA, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. It’s full of retired and sitting US military. It has been a longstanding policy of Zionism to tie the US and Israeli militaries together at the hip like Siamese twins, and that is what has been done.

A former Marine officer told me about the Israelis, “We (US national security) got totally infiltrated by (the Israelis) back in the early 1980′s, and they’ve been there ever since. By now, it’s impossible to get rid of them.” Many US national security concerns have been signed over to the Israelis, and Israeli spies, double agents and dual citizens are running amok all over our national security complex.

Support for radical Zionism is now an essential part of US military doctrine, and overwhelmingly, US Gentiles in the security state, the legislative branch and the Executive Branch are now on board with it. So it’s not a bunch of Jews pulling the strings.

It’s more, “We are all Jews now,” Jewmerica, Judeomerica, the Jewnited States of America, USreal, Israel as the 51st state, etc.

This is why I used “USreal” and “Jewmerica” to describe the two countries which are essentially tied together as a single nation at the moment. Jews are only 2% of the US population. They couldn’t have tied the two countries together without a Hell of a lot of Gentile help.

The oil people were initially against the war, but Cheney et al convinced the oil people that the war was a done deal and told them to get on board. They laid out maps of Iraqi oil fields before the war and divided them up. Nevertheless, oil was not the major reason for the war.

The major reason for the war was US politics. It wasn’t a war for Israel or a war for the Jews or any of that crap. Those were decorations on the cake, not part of the main ingredients.

All You Need to Know About “Regime Change”, Neocons and USreal’s Policy in the Middle East

From the Amazon comments section:

The only acceptable and effective regime change is from within, by class struggle. Occupation by outsiders produces only a war of all against all, the sectarian chaos of feuding warlords and clans, as in pre-revolutionary China and now in occupied Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan. Now the US-British-Israeli alliance aims to do the same to Iran, Syria and Lebanon.

Israel’s government wants not `two states for two peoples’, but `five states for two peoples’; the core, Israel, surrounded by a ring of armed settlement blocs, and then by four isolated Bantustans for the Palestinians.

In Israel and the Clash of Civilizations Jonathan Cook argues that the prevalent view of Iraq’s fate – that its civil war was a terrible and unforeseen consequence of the US invasion and a series of bad decisions made by the occupation regime – is profoundly mistaken.

Rather, civil war and partition were the intended outcome of the invasion and seen as beneficial to American interests, or at least they were by a small group of ultra-hawks known as the neoconservatives who came to dominate the White House under President George W.Bush…In the early 1980s Israel’s security establishment has developed ideas about dissolving the other states of the Middle East to encourage ethnic and religious discord.

This was in essence a re-imagining of the regional power structure that had existed under the Ottomans – before the arrival of the European colonialists and their forced reordering of the Middle East into nation states – but with Israel replacing the Turks as the local imperial power. In this way, hoped Israel and the neocons, large and potentially powerful states such as Iraq and Iran could be partitioned between their rival ethnic and sectarian communities.

How come you never see analysis like this in any US paper? How many Moronicans in Jewmerica ever read an analysis like this, much less understand it or believe it?

It’s so hard to believe, but it must be true. The first two paragraphs are de facto correct. The others are problematic because it’s so hard to believe that there are people who are so evil that they really wanted to see Iraq torn apart and 1.4 million Iraqis slaughtered. Well, if we had to kill 1.4 million Iraqis to save the Jews of Israel, so be it, right? But what threat was Iraq to the Jews of Israel anyway?

It’s also clear that all of these idiot Islamists who are busy slaughtering each other in Iraq are doing nothing but playing right into the hands of the Israelis. So are the characters in Syria, the leaders of whom have recently asked for the West and Israel to intervene to overthrow Assad. Getting rid of Arab nationalist Ghaddafi was also part of this Jewmerican project. The coming war with Iran, if it happens at all, will be another one.

It’s sad to see the Arabs playing right into Israeli and US hands with all their Islamist crap. Why don’t the Arab Islamists just go work for Mossad already?