THE POLITICS OF ANTI-SEMITISM : Cleveland IMC (((i)))

The Politics of Anti-Semitism

Edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair (Petrolia/Oakland, CA, CounterPunch and AK Press, 2003, 178 p.)

Foreword by the Compilers
Introduction by the Publisher
Contents
Reviews

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Compilers Foreword
We find the question of seperating Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism so important, that we have compiled this 2. online edition of all the contributions in this heavy anthology on the subject.
Our main purpose is to contribute to the situation and ongoing suffering of the Palestinian people, even now 60 years after the foundation of the Zionist settler state Israel.
At the buttom of Contents we have compiled a few selected reviews of the book.

Compiled by Bjarne A. Frandsen & Jørgen Lund
Modkraft.dk/Tidsskriftcentret (Copenhagen, Denmark)
2. ed., April 2008

See also our webliography The Israel Lobby and US foreign policy (Modkraft.dk/Tidsskriftcentret, 2007)

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Introduction
"How did a term, once used accurately to describe the most virulent evil, become a charge flung at the mildest critic of Israel, particularly concerning its atrocious treatment of Palestinians? Edited by Cockburn and St. Clair, the print and online journal Counterpunch has become a must read for hundreds of thousands a month who no longer believe anything they read in the mainstream press beyond the sports scores. And on the subject of Israel and Palestine, of the Israel lobby in the US, the current middle east crisis, and its ramifications at home and abroad, Counterpunch has been unrivalled. Herein you’ll find 18 of the finest essays and articles (from 9 Jews and 9 Gentiles!). A lot of the names will be familiar - Edward Said, Robert Fisk, Norman Finkelstein, Lenni Brenner, Uri Avnery, plus the editors. Then, there’s former CIA analysts Bill and Kathy Christison, the trenchant and witty philosopher Michael Neumann, seasoned Capitol Hill staffer George Sutherland, Will Yeoman’s path-breaking essay on Israel and divestment, Shaheed Alam who became a target of the fanatical Daniel Pipes and Israeli journalist Yigal Bronner. Plus Kurt Nimmo, Bruce Jackson, Jeffrey Blankfort and more. This, the first in the new Counterpunch series from AK Press, is a timely anthology on how silence and complicity in crimes against a betrayed people has been enforced."

Contents:
Michael Neumann: What is Anti-Semitism? (p. 1-12)
"Inflating the meaning of ’antisemitism’ to include anything politically damaging to Israel is a double-edged sword. It may be handy for smiting your enemies, but the problem is that definitional inflation, like any inflation, cheapens the currency."
Michael Neumann is a professor of philosophy at Trent University in Ontario, Canada.

Scott Handleman: Trivializing Jew-hatred (p. 13-19)
"Partisans of Israel often make false accusations of anti-Semitism to silence Israel’s critics. The ’antisemite!’ libel is harmful not only because it censors debate about Israel’s racism and human rights abuses, but because it trivializes the ugly history of Jew-hatred."
Scott Handleman is studying law at Boalt, at the University of California, Berkeley.

Alexander Cockburn: My life as an ’Anti-Semite’ (p. 21-38)
"The real problem is most Jews here just don’t like hearing bad things said about Israel, same way they don’t like reading articles about the Jewish lobby here. Mention the lobby and someone will rush into print saying ’Cockburn toys with the old anti-Semitic canard that the Jews control the press’."
Alexander Cockburn is coeditor of CounterPunch.

Lenni Brenner: Anti-Semitism, old and new (p. 39-41)
"Zionists never stop proclaiming that they represent ’the Jews.’ Is it strange that some ignorant Muslims believe them and equate Judaism with Zionism?"
Lenni Brenner is author of Zionism in the Age of the Dictators.

Uri Avnery: Manufacturing Anti-Semites (p. 43-47)
"The State of Israel is causing the resurrection of anti-Semitism all over the world, threatening Jews everywhere. The Sharon government is a giant laboratory for the growing of the anti-Semitism virus."
Uri Avnery is an Israeli journalist, peace activist and former Knesset member.

Linda Belanger: Word’s hurt, but tanks kill : putting accusations of Anti-Semitism in context (p. 49-51)
"... one is made to feel that Jews are more victimized than other groups or that anti-Semitism is somehow more abhorrent than other forms of racism."

Bruce Jackson: Jews like us (p. 53-57)
"It’s weird and freaky when militant right-wing Jews can hook up with old-fashioned anti-Semites to stereotype the rest of us, but these are weird and freaky times."
Bruce Jackson is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Samuel P. Capen Professor of American Culture at University of Buffalo.

Robert Fisk: Why does Malkovich want to kill me? (p. 59-62)
"In 26 years in the Middle East, I have never read so many vile and intimidating messages addressed to me. Many now demand my death. And last week, the Hollywood actor John Malkovich did just that, telling the Cambridge Union that he would like to shoot me."
Robert Fisk reports on the Middle East for the London Independent.

Kurt Nimmo: Poetry as treason? (p. 63-67)
"It seems you not only have to be careful what you say, as White House spokesman Ari Fleischer warned last year, but also what you write, especially if you are an African-American poet with a Muslim name and Marxist politics."
Kurt Nimmo is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

Will Youmans: The divestmen campaign/Critics charge that divestment ’singles out’ Israel (p. 69-72)
"What bewilders me is that so many critics attack viciously the critical singling out of Israel by the divestment campaign, but are actively supportive of singling out Israel as a special ally and worthy recipient of disproportionately high arms, aid, and trade."
Will Youmans is a third year law student at UC-Berkeley.

M. Shahid Alam: A new technology of power (p. 73-77)
"Over the past year, however, I began to cross that thin line which I should have known one crosses only at some peril. I began to talk and write about Israel. None of this would have been newsworthy if I had been reading from the script; but I was not. Instead, I began calling a spade a spade. In other words, I was stepping over the line."
M. Shahid Alam is Professor of Economics at Northeastern University, Boston.

Norman Finkelstein: Counterfeit courage : reflections on "Political Correctness" in Germany (p. 79-83)
"The challenge in Germany today is to defend the memory of the Nazi holocaust and to condemn its abuse by American Jewish elites; to defend Jews from malice and to condemn their overwhelmingly blind support for Israel’s brutal occupation."
Norman Finkelstein is the author of The Holocaust Industry and Image and Reality in the Israel-Palestine Conflict.

Jeffrey St. Clair: Rockets, napalm, torpedoes, and lies : Israel’s attack on the Liberty, revisited (p. 85-97)
"In early June of 1967, at the onset of the Six Day War, the Pentagon sent the USS Liberty from Spain into international waters off the coast of Gaza to monitor the progress of Israel’s attack on the Arab states. The Liberty was a lightly armed surveillance ship. Only hours after the Liberty arrived it was spotted by the Israeli military."
Jeffrey St. Clair is coeditor of CounterPunch.

Jeffrey Blankfort: The Israel lobby and the left (p. 99-117)
"That there is a meeting of the minds on this issue between supporters of Israel and the Left may help explain why the Palestine support movement within the United States has been an utter failure."
Jeffrey Blankfort is former editor of the Middle East Labor Bulletin and has written extensively on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

George Sunderland: Our Vichy congress (p. 119-126)
"A Congressional staffer details Israel’s stranglehold on Capitol Hill."
George Sunderland is the pen name of a Congressional staff member.

Kathleen and Bill Christison: The Bush Administration’s dual loyalities (p. 127-143)
"The issue we are dealing with in the Bush administration is dual loyalties-the double allegiance of those myriad officials at high and middle levels who cannot distinguish U.S. interests from Israeli interests, who baldly promote the supposed identity of interests between the United States and Israel, who spent their early careers giving policy advice to right-wing Israeli governments and now give the identical advice to a right-wing U.S. government."
Kathleen Christison worked for 16 years as a political analyst with the CIA. Bill Christison joined the CIA in 1950, and served on the analysis side of the Agency for 28 years.

Yigal Bronner: A journey to Beit Jalla (p. 145-149)
"The people of the village Beit Jalla have been under curfew for the last month, with no end in sight. Now, for the first time in several days, the curfew has been lifted for a few hours, allowing them to stock up supplies (not that the shops in the village have much to offer)."
Yigal Bronner is a member of Ta’ayush - Arab-Jewish Partnership.

Edward Said: Dignity, solidarity and the penal colony (p. 151-172)
"In fact, I cannot think of any other country on earth that, in full view of nightly TV audiences, has performed such miracles of detailed sadism against an entire society and gotten away with it."
Edward Said is a professor at Columbia University.

Reviews
Gilles d’Aymery: The Politics of Anti-Semitism:
Part 1: Smear, slander, and intimidation (Swans, April 26, 2004)
Part 2: Stereotypes and other canards (May 10, 2004)
"Cockburn and St. Clair assembled a series of, for the most part, brilliant and incisive essays superbly written by a variety of thoughtful authors ... Wide spread anti-Semitism and anti-Semitism baiting are properly debunked; the Israeli repressive policies against the Palestinians lucidly tackled, showing that contrary to the line propagated by Officialdom Jewish Americans are far from forming a monolithic, pro-Israel block; and, the case is made, albeit less convincingly, on the influence of Israel and US Jewish organizations on official Washington (which will be explored in Part II of this review)."

Hadas Thier: Zionism and Anti-Semitism: Are Israel’s critics Anti-Semites? (International Socialist Review, Issue 38, November-December 2004)
"There are a couple of mistaken responses to the confusion (which Zionists have been careful to sow) about the relationship between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. One is to completely dismiss anti-Semitism as altogether irrelevant. A pretty outrageous example of this is Michael Neuman’s essay in The Politics of Anti-Semitism where he argues, ’I think we should almost never take anti-Semitism seriously, and maybe we should have some fun with it’ ... Besides showing a complete disdain for anyone who might be genuinely worried about anti-Semitism, Neuman also shows a total misunderstanding of the nature and character of anti-Semitism and how it has been used historically."

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666 THE DEVIL (GEORGE WARMONGER BUSH) : "Sorry to Oil the BUSH AL CIADA 9-11 Attacks, the Anti-Semetic Framing of Semites in the Middle East aka Arabs by BUSH NEWS NAZIS CNN NBC ABC CBS FOX, the Post 9-11 Bush Wars For Oil on Semitic Tribes of the Middle East, the Post 9-11 Bush Sponsored Antisemitic Mosque Bombings in the Middle East by AL CIADA (The CIA Duh) and the Post 9-11 Bush Sponsored Antisemitism in the Holy Land by IDF IAF SS Nazis / Likud Brownshirts / Irgun Zvai Leumi Terrorist of ISRAHEIL but Oil comes First. FILL HER UP ????????????"

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3542849, on Friday, May 16th at 8:06 AM

Rights group got it wrong: Gaza cancer patient who 'died while waiting for permit' still alive

Stayin' alive: Muhammad al-Harrani, a father of six from Gaza diagnosed with cancer who reportedly died while waiting for a permit to enter Israel, miraculously "came back to life." This was not the result of a miracle, but rather, just part of the tactics used by al-Harrani's family in a bid to secure a permit for him.

Al-Harrani is currently awaiting an entry permit into Israel, so that he can undergo head surgery at Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center and receive radiation and chemotherapy treatment. At the end of April he was summoned to a questioning session at the Erez Crossing as part of the permit process, but the session was postponed by a week.

On the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, al-Harrani’s story was published. His family reported to the “Physicians for Human Rights” organization that he died. “The sick man could not withstand the wait for the permit,” claimed Ran Yaron, Director of the Occupied Territories Department who blamed the Shin Bet for adopting cruel policies against cancer patients.

However, the next day, the organization discovered that al-Harrani was still alive. Members of group estimated that his brother, who reported the death, “killed” him so he does not report to the questioning session.

“This is a rare case where a family member knowingly provided false information to the organization,” Physicians for Human Rights said. “Usually, the organization receives information from the families and from the hospitals, but in this case the information was received from the family and was not confirmed by the hospital."

Meanwhile, the Shin Bet sent the organization an angry response: “We view these harsh accusations on your part with great severity; not even a minimal inquiry into the facts was conducted.” The Shin Bet noted that due to the suspicion of his involvement in terror activities, al-Harrani was indeed called in for a security check, and it was indeed postponed by a week.

THE GHOST OF PRESCOTT BUSH SR. : "Sorry to Oil the Bush backing of Adolph Hiter before and During WW II, the Bush Profitting from Nazi Slave Labor, the Bush Financing of IG Farben, the Bush Financing of The Nazi Death Camps, the Post WW II Bush Aid to Mengele, the Post WW II Bush Aid to Barbie, the Post WW II Bush Aid Eichman, and the Post WW II Bush Aid to the Odessa Network but Oil comes First. FILL HER UP ????????????"

Palestinians use school as launching pad for rockets

Posted by http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/1 on Sunday, May 25th at 8:58 AM

Gaza Schoolyard Missile Launchers Discovered

by Hana Levi Julian

(IsraelNN.com) IDF soldiers uncovered missiles and anti-tank rocket launchers in a Gaza schoolyard in late Thursday. The anti-tank missile launcher and a stack of missiles were found at a school in Sajaiya, in northern Gaza, during routine counter-terrorism operations.

The Israel Air Force reports hitting two members of a terror cell carrying anti-tank weapons in southern Gaza, after an IDF soldier was moderately wounded in a firefight with terrorists in the area early Friday morning. The soldier was struck down when terrorists fired anti-tank shells at the troops. He was airlifted to Soroka Medical Center in Be'er Sheva.

Soldiers from the elite Givati Brigade, tank corps and engineering units have been carrying out counterterrorism operations throughout Gaza since Thursday, when Islamic Jihad operatives attacked the Erez Crossing.

Suicide bombers detonated a truck bomb on the Gaza side of the terminal. No IDF soldiers were wounded in the blast. A short time later, IAF pilots tracked down a vehicle carrying Islamic Jihad operatives fleeing the scene and confirmed killing at least two of the terrorists.

Terrorists also attacked soldiers at the Sufa and Karni crossings on Thursday, two more conduits through which humanitarian supplies, including food, medicine, medical equipment and other essential supplies are delivered to Gaza each week. One terrorist was killed and several others were wounded.

In another attack, terrorists fired mortar shells Thursday at the Nahal Oz fuel depot, the terminal through which cooking gas and other fuel supplies are pumped into Gaza. The Nahal Oz fuel depot has been attacked by terrorists numerous times this year. In one instance, Hamas terrorists robbed 60,000 liters of gasoline from their own Palestinian Authority Gaza Power Authority, earmarked for local use.

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/126267

There is no ethnic cleansing

Posted by http://www.bluetruth.net on Tuesday, June 3rd at 4:53 PM

One of the big lies told by anti-Israel agitators, is that Israel's existence as a Jewish state is uniquely unacceptable in today's world. Another fabrication is that of "ethnic cleansing" of Arabs, both in 1948 as a result of Israel's War of Independence and also after 1967, when Israel took control of the West Bank and Gaza from their previous occupiers (Jordan and Egypt, respectively); this claim gets even more fantastically metamorphed into charges of "genocide" begin committed by Israel. Doing an internet search with either one of those terms and "Israel" yields a lengthy list of websites, many of which claim to be "antiwar", trumpeting such charges.

Interestingly enough, it's actually quite simple to rebut these lies using some rather simple arithmetic. All of the statistics used here are from Israeli-Palestinian ProCon, which is a neutral site that does not take positions on the issues and is not run by advocates with either a pro- or anti-Israel position. (Of course, you can hear the screams of "if you're not obviously against the racist-colonialist-Zionist-occupiers then we can't trust anything you say" from those who promote the big lies. Just ignore them and focus on the facts.)

In 1946 "Palestine" (the British Mandate, comprising what is now Israel, the West Bank and Gaza) had 608,000 Jews and 1,237,000 Arabs (all statistics rounded to the nearest thousand). As a result of the war of extermination launched by 5 Arab countries against the nascent state of Israel, there was a population exchange-- the Arab population mostly ended up in the West Bank and Gaza, to be imprisoned in refugee camps there. The Jewish population that had lived outside the borders of the state of Israel either fled as refugees to Israel or were killed. By 1949, Israel had 159,00 Arab citizens and 1,014,000 Jewish citizens. In 1950, the nearest year for which population statistics are available, the West Bank and Gaza had 1,005,000 Arabs and no (living) Jews-- it was a thoroughly ethnically cleansed area. Some towns like Hebron that had Jewish populations for uninterrupted centuries were actually ethnically cleansed long before the UN Partition Plan, as the result of pogroms. Some, like the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem and the kibbutzim of the Etzion Bloc, were conquered by Arabs and the survivors forced to flee for their lives.
You can learn more about the ethnic cleansing of Jewish communities in Palestine here .

Now let's see what happened after 1967. The population of the West Bank in 1970 (prior to the re-establishment of any Jewish population in that area, outside of Jerusalem) was 677,000 Arabs--and no Jews (except for a few hundred of the ancient Samartian cult living near Nablus). By 2003, the Arab population was 2,300,000 and the Jewish population was 219,000. Yes, that's right. The Arab population more than TRIPLED over that time. In Gaza there were 368,000 Arabs in 1970; by 2003 there were 1,337, 000. Yes, that's not a typo. Under the supposedly genocidal and tyrannical rule of Israeli occupation, the population of Gaza went up FOURFOLD. The Jewish population of Gaza in 2003 was 7,500. Now, of course, it is down to one: Gilad Shalit, the kidnapped Israeli soldier who has been held incommunicado by Hamas terrorists for nearly a year and denied access to Red Cross representatives.

Oh, but certainly in Jerusalem the Arabs are getting pushed out of their neighborhoods and ethnically cleansed, right? Sorry, once again those pesky facts get in the way:
1946: Population of Jerusalem --34,000 Muslims, 31,000 Christians (probably not all Arab), 99,000 Jews
1967: 58,000 Muslims, 13,000 Christians, and 197,000 Jews
2000: 197,000 Muslims, 14,000 Christians and 440,000 Jews

Once again, the Muslim population more than tripled since Israel re-unified the city!

Those crafty Zionists-- conducting ethnic cleansing but hiding it so well that the Arab population doubles every 20 years. How do they pull it off?
http://Www.bluetruth.net

Palestinians 'Peoplehood' Based on a Big Lie

http://winnipeg.indymedia.org/item.php?15610S

It's NOT The Occupation, Stupid

http://winnipeg.indymedia.org/item.php?15609S

Palestinians have Bosnian heritage

http://winnipeg.indymedia.org/item.php?15607S

1948, Israel, and the Palestinians - The True Story

http://winnipeg.indymedia.org/item.php?15604S

Amin al-Husaini and the Holocaust. What Did the Grand Mufti Know?

http://winnipeg.indymedia.org/item.php?15603S

Israel: The State of the Jewish People, and Rightfully So

http. http://www.bluetruth.net

Cleveland Indy Media Center