174538 You are sleeping, you do not want to believe.... (english) karl 1:50am Sun Apr 21 '02 (Modified on 5:28am Sun Apr 21 '02) article#174538 as read this, carefully, i experienced a moment of clarity. IRREFUTABLE. Santiago Alba Rico Rebelion.org April 19, 2002 MIDEAST WATCH Translated by Francisco Gonzalez  ----------  National Review Sept 17, 2001 Solzhenitsyn, Still: The writer and his latest challenge.(Two Hundred Years Together) and response by LBO Chris at russiajournal.com  --------- Lenni Brenner (Review of his:  The Iron Wall: Zionist Revisionism from Jabotinsky to Shamir ---- article by him: The Two US-Afghan Wars) ----- 175450 +10 a brief history of the israeli-arab conflict ----------- 175673 The Beginning Of The End Of Jewish Post-War Ascendancy? --------------- 174538 You are sleeping, you do not want to believe.... (english) karl 1:50am Sun Apr 21 '02 (Modified on 5:28am Sun Apr 21 '02) article#174538 as read this, carefully, i experienced a moment of clarity. IRREFUTABLE. Santiago Alba Rico Rebelion.org April 19, 2002 MIDEAST WATCH Translated by Francisco González I deny that Turkey destroyed 3,200 villages, killed thousands of Kurds and imprisoned men and women for transcribing their names in Kurdish. I deny that the United States has caused the death--directly or indirectly--of 25 million people (Korea, Indochina, Guatemala, Chile, Argentina, Angola, Panama, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia and a long etcetera.) since the end of World War II. I deny that the Israelis demolish homes, uproot olive trees, upturn ambulances, shoot journalists, mutilate children, summarily execute members of the resistance and are attempting to exterminate four million Palestinians. I deny that the Nazis persecuted, tortured and exterminated six million Jews. Why do I say that? What I mean to say is: Why do those who deny the Holocaust fall into well-deserved disrepute, see their books prohibited and their utterances denounced, must face isolation, ostracism or even imprisonment--while those who deny or silence or justify the crimes of Turkey, the US or Israel--to mention just a few cases--find themselves promoted in their careers, rewarded with an important public position or a daily column in a big newspaper, flattered with special deluxe editions and commendatory reviews, and generally blessed, decorated and applauded? I declare that the Nazis persecuted, tortured and exterminated six million Jews. I also declare that Turkey, the US and Israel have opened three new wounds on the aching side of humanity. And I say that everyone of us should acknowledge these facts, lest our own individual penknives go delve also into those wounds. And I say that those unable or unwilling to acknowledge all these things simultaneously are not only guilty of moral corruption--they become retrospective accomplices--and worse-- to all the horrors of the Holocaust, and deserve the punishment that Nuremberg reserved for collaborators. We have condemned the wretched of the world to move within the extremely narrow confines between the following two alternatives: the temptation of hatred and the temptation of supernatural goodness. We admire the good slaves, and we even import their beliefs, along with their coffee and their cocoa, so as to spiritualize our digestions. And if we align ourselves a little further to the left we even manage to understand--though still denouncing their excesses--the anger and resentment of the bad slaves. But Palestinians are not allowed even that much. We allow Kosovars to hate their Serb oppressors. We understand the Hutu may hate the Tutsi, the Berbers may hate the Arabs, blacks may hate whites. We allow perhaps for the Timorese and the Kurds to hate their executioners. We allow, of course, for the victims of terrorism to hate ETA and bin Laden (and we allow in addition that this hatred be materialized by thermobaric bombs and missiles). Palestinians are not allowed any of this. If an Israeli soldier, castled behind his armor, puts a Palestinian teenage boy on his knees, ties his hands behind his back and breaks the bones in his arms with the butt of his gun, the hatred of this Palestinian constitutes an immensely more serious crime (anti-Semitism!) than the actions of his aggressor. What’s more, the hatred felt by the Palestinian justifies, legitimates, purifies the behavior of the soldier. If the word "Jew" means "victim," if only "Jew" means "victim", if all the Jews--Primo Levi and Sharon, Ann Frank and Rotschild--are equally victims, then "Jewish State" and "Jewish Sword" and "Jewish Executioner" all mean "victim"; and the victims of these victims are the executioners. These days, unarmed Jewish tanks confront children who have teeth; and defenseless airplanes defend themselves against mothers who hide an ache under their skirts; and completely unprotected missiles--like the David of the Bible--aim at towering giants of dignity and decency. Such stupefying disparity, such manifest inequality between a defenseless war technology and a superior dignity, a superior reason, is referred to by the most moderate newspapers--and the most daring politicians--as “combats.” Saramago’s “nonsense” The Holocaust, like the death of Christ, took place at specific time in History, but it assumes a kind of metaphysical hyper reality outside of History, always synchronic, which, like the traumatic eternity of certain neuroses, prevents one from acknowledging that events continue to happen, that we continue doing things, and that we are responsible for what we do. The original wound of the “Jewish State”, like the original trauma of the neurotic, blames the universe without interruption; and if the universe finds it at fault, then the “Jewish State” blames the universe for its own sense of guilt: one cannot charge a grief so vast with so small a crime, not without becoming guilty of an aggression that is already the virtual repetition of the brutal original scene. The fault of those who remind the neurotic that he, too, may be guilty, is called “insensitivity”. The fault of those who remind the “Jewish State” that it also can be guilty, is called “anti-Semitism”. Before the Holocaust, no affliction occurred (excluding perhaps the enslavement of the Hebrews by the Pharaoh) from which to extract any lessons. After the Holocaust, all crimes are forgivable, except any pretense to rival “Jewish” grief. The very sound of a grievous moan may be deemed “anti-Semitic.” The photograph of Mohamed Dorra embracing the dead body of his son is an instrument of the conspiracy against the “chosen people”. Shocked by the already well-known statements of Saramago, Menahem Peri said he felt outraged: "Only if we were sending today six million Arabs to the gas chambers would he have the right to make such a comparison." Do we get it? What Peri is saying is that, as long as we keep under six million, it’s okay. Under that figure, our innocence is guaranteed: we will never be Nazis, and therefore we will never be “bad,” and anyone who dares denounce our modest bloodbath--as Saramago did--falls into “moral blindness” and “anti-Semitic hatred.” Peri may rest assured: there are only four million Palestinians in Palestine. If his defenseless tanks managed to kill half of them in this campaign, they would reduce the basis for such outlandish comparisons even further. The smaller the number of Palestinians that are left, the more removed we will be from the shadow of Nazism. And when only one of them is left standing--alone and defeated on his own gigantic and exactly human pair of legs--the act of putting him on his knees, tying his hands behind his back, and breaking his arms with the butt our gun will be the proof and the cause of our incontestable goodness. The day we can no longer kill anyone, no “anti-Semite” will be able to accuse us of cruelty. Comparisons are, indeed, odious. Amos Oz, a fine writer and an apocryphal leftist, also expressed his reaction to Saramago’s “nonsense” with a typical Freudian projection: "The Israeli occupation is unfair, but comparing it with the crimes of the Nazis would be like comparing Saramago with Stalin". I remember having read the anecdote of a man who goes to church to confess his sins: "Father, I have been unfair: I slit my father’s throat, I raped my mother and I poisoned my brothers". "Why son"--said the priest with a shudder--“That’s murder!" Bombing schools and hospitals--is that "unfair"? Uprooting 120,000 olive trees, bulldozing or blowing up 3,750 residential units and expelling 40,000 people in one year--is that "unfair"? Stealing 3669 square kilometers of land--is that “unfair”? Shooting children in the head, executing unarmed men in alleyways, depriving the civilian population of water, food and electricity--is that “unfair”? Is it unfair to brand the arms of people, to lock them in detention camps, to prevent ambulances from reaching their destination, to erase the names of Palestinian villages, to blow up the Registrar’s building in Ramallah, to assault churches, to burn mosques, to urinate in the children’s rooms? Does Amos Oz think that the suicide bomber who sets off a bomb in a Tel Aviv restaurant is “unfair”? A treaty may be unfair; and there may be unfair sentences; and it will certainly be unfair that the horrors of the occupation remain unpunished. But the occupation... the occupation is not unfair: the occupation is a crime. And anyone who does not see it that way is, without a doubt, closer to Hitler and Stalin than to Saramago. The comparison that Saramago made is exact to the letter (notice that he carefully says “in spirit”) and has had the unfortunate result of calling attention to the Holocaust once again, to the detriment of the Occupation. Everything is being presented as though the kinship between Israel and Nazism must be proven first in order for us to be allowed to condemn the actions of Israel, as if, unless this affinity can be demonstrated, the Israelis could be allowed to humiliate, steal and murder without ever losing their innocence. But we will not let you maintain your innocence. You are not Nazis, that’s true: you are a bunch of vulgar, heartless butchers, slayers of old people, child killers, filthy humiliators of women, land thieves, looters of shanty homes, unprincipled bullies, moral idiots, arrogant colonizing beasts attempting to enlarge your country by belittling your (all) humanity. But we will not let you keep your innocence. You will at least lose that in your massacre of these giants: you are degrading yourselves to the exact extent of your crimes. You may win, but you will not convince us of your purity. You will keep the land and the water of your victims, but we will not forgive you. You may be invulnerable, but you will no longer give us any lessons. You will strut up and down the desert of all values, meeting no resistance, but you will be small, vulgar, worthless, like all those who build their worldly greatness on their moral impotence. Israel (let us leave the Jews alone) is no longer the name of a people; it is the name of an exterminating angel, the cipher of a crime, the temperature of an ideology. And if you don’t make haste to correct yourselves, if you don’t think it over in a hurry and change the direction of your steps, you will end up erasing the memory of the Holocaust, which memory the rest of us will have to keep alive against you. One day, when people wish to exaggerate, describe the essence of an outrage, name the most execrable behavior, or vent with an insult the pain of an injustice, they will no longer say “Nazi” but “Israeli”. And that, in effect, would not be just either. A few days ago, propped on the soapbox of his little column in a national newspaper, an ex-communist quoted Sartre in order to intimidate the “anti-Semites” that are trying to save lives in Palestine. The news I have regarding Sartre is much more recent. Sartre wrote today, just a moment ago, the following words that he published in 1961, at the height of the Algerian war: "First we must confront a surprising spectacle: the striptease of our humanism. Here it is, naked, and not at all pretty to behold; it was just a deceiving ideology, the exquisite justification for looting. Its tender turns of phrase and its preciosity justified our aggression. How pretty it is to preach non-violence!: Neither victims nor executioners! Oh come on now! If you are not victims--when the government you have elected and the army in which your younger brothers have served, have initiated a “genocide” with no trace of hesitation or remorse--then you are undoubtedly executioners. You should understand this once and for all: if violence has just started; if exploitation and oppression never existed on the face of the earth, then maybe the much-vaunted “non-violence” could put an end to the dispute. But if the entire regime, and even its ideas about non-violence, are conditioned by a thousand-year-old oppression, your passivity is useless except to alienate you on the side of the oppressors". There are victims and there are oppressors. And those who deny, those who silence, those who lie, those who make excuses, those who qualify things--from their column or from their government--have chosen the side of the oppressors. "After Auschwitz we are all Jews," Sartre wrote. But the neurotic who reminds us of this quote from his bulletproof newspaper forgets that Sartre was a sane man, a man who did not live with the original trauma but in the course of history, who knew that after Auschwitz rivers of blood have still been spilled, continue to be spilled; a man before whose eyes things continued to unfold. Which is why he also wrote, in 1961: "We are all Algerians". And in 1967: "We are all Vietnamese". And in 1975: "We are all Timorese". A sane man who today, 7 April 2002, while Sharon has closed the Palestinian camps and cities so as to be able to bomb them without being bothered by anyone: "We are all Palestinians". If Jew means victim, then the Jews of today are the Palestinians. If Jew means something else, if it means the inalienable essence and particularity of a chosen people, the specific substance of a race or a culture, then nobody can demand human beings to experience their particular pain, to condemn the ones who gassed them and become “Jews” every time it becomes necessary to combat their oppressors anew. But “Jew” means victim; it is one of the many--too many--synonyms that our shrunken bloody century has produced to refer to victims. Eichmann and Barbie were not tried for crimes against “Judaism”; they were tried for Crimes against Humanity. That is why all the victims--and only the victims--are Jews (as well as Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians, Saharaouis, Kurds, Argentineans, Tzotziles, Mapuches, Ecuadorians...). That is why Sharon is not a Jew; there is not one single Jew in the Government of Israel, and very few among its citizens (but let me mention here the names of some brave "anti-Semite" Israeli Jews whom I respectfully salute: the pacifists of Gush Shalom, Uri Avneri, the journalist Amira Hass, the 357 refusenik reservists, Assaf Oron, the Women in Black and so many others who are victims in their own country of the marginalization and oppression of the majority). We are all Jews, and Jews are the patrimony of everyone, except for Israel and its supporters; except for the cowardly, servile European Union; except for the corrupt, dictatorial Arab regimes that wrap themselves in the Palestinian flag while repressing demonstrators in Cairo, Tunis and Amman. Not only Saramago: even Wafá Idris, a murderous suicide-bomber, has a higher moral authority to speak about the Holocaust than Amos Oz or Menahem Peri. And that’s why, while the F-16’s destroy the historic center of Nablus and the tanks prevent the wounded from being picked up, we should cry out: “Jews of the world, unite!”. Unite, Jews, against the government of Israel; unite against imperialism and global war, unite against all the assassins, the liars, the negationists, the indifferent, the opportunists, the corrupt, the exploiters--even if they are not Nazis. Refounding Israel Israelis must understand what an urgent task it is to refound or re-establish the State of Israel on completely new bases, away from the “benefits” of the Holocaust and the hysterical, mystical, expansionist nationalism of Zionism, which has built an ideological Fatherland on the manipulation of its own pain and the multiplication of that of its neighbors. From the very start, the movement created by Theodor Herzl in 1897 was governed by Reason of State and by the necessity to privilege the construction of a Jewish State above all other considerations of a political or moral nature. The Nazis alone are less entitled to play with the Jewish tragedy of the Shoah. Between August 1933 and the beginning of World War II in 1939, with the Nuremberg Laws in effect, after the Crystal Night, the Zionist National Agency maintained official economic relations with Hitler’s government, within the framework of the so called Haavara Agreement, which allowed the Zionists to attract great Jewish fortunes to Palestine, giving the German industry an escape way for its exports, which were subject to an international boycott. On 7 December 1938, Ben Gurion declines the offer made by Britain to take in a few thousand Jewish children from Austria and Germany: "If I was given the choice between saving all the Jewish children from Germany by taking them to Britain, or saving only half of them by taking them to Eretz-Israel, I would choose the latter. Because we must consider not only the life of these children, but also the history of the Jewish people". On 11 November, 1940, the Jewish refugees sheltered in the Patria, a ship at anchor in the port of Haifa, are refused permission to go ashore in Palestine, and they are offered instead the option of going to the Mauritius Islands. The Jewish National Agency puts pressure on the British government, unsuccessfully, and on the 25th of the same month an explosion kills 240 refugees and 12 policemen in an operation masterminded by Eliahu Golomb, personal friend and right arm of Ben Gurion. In 1943, while gassing goes on in Treblinka, Sobibor and Auschwitz, the American Zionist Congress decides to give priority to the creation of a Jewish State in Palestine once the war is over, over the immediate salvation of the European Jews. As late as 1944, the notorious terrorist Izhak Shamir, Prime Minister of Israel during the Madrid conference in 1991, was negotiating with the German army--which by then was facing serious problems--the delivery of some trucks for troop transportation (or was it prisoner transportation?) on condition that they be used only on the Russian front. That is Zionism. In the late seventies and early eighties, the Israeli government was training the death squads in Bolivia and Guatemala (250,000 dead) in clandestine operations whose mediator was... Klaus Barbie, a conspicuous Nazi who was later tried and sentenced in Lyon for crimes against Humanity. And the tale goes on, against all the illusions created by neurosis. Only two months ago, on 25 January 2002, Amir Oren, the military commentator for Ha'eretz (an Israeli newspaper) wrote: "In order to adequately prepare us for the next stage, one of the commanding officers of the Israeli army in the (occupied) territories, recently said that it is justifiable, even vital, to extract lessons from every possible source. If the mission involves the occupation of a densely populated territory, or the Kasbah in Nablus, and the commanding officer’s goal is to try and accomplish its mission without casualties on either side, then he will need to analyze and assimilate the lessons of previous battles, and this includes--no matter how horrible it may sound--the lesson of how the German army operated in the Warsaw ghetto." Two months later, in Ramallah, Jenin, Tulkarem, Nablus, we can measure the full extent of the benefit that the Israeli army was able to derive from this lesson. Comparisons are odious when it is Saramago who makes them and they involve denouncing a crime, but when it comes to planning the crime, then they are "justifiable and even vital". Keeping our silence We cannot keep silent if we wish to preserve our sanity at the very least. Just before I finish, let me quote Sartre again, one of the sanest and most intelligent men, one of the true great figures in a century of acquiescing dwarfs and rhetorical fluffs. This is how he addressed the French while the Algerians were getting ready to bury one million dead victims of--as some say about Israel--the only democracy in Northern Africa: "It is not good, my countrymen and women, you who are aware of all the crimes committed in our name, it is really not good that you are not telling a word about this to anyone, not even to your own souls, out of fear that you may have to pass judgement on yourselves. In the beginning you did not know--I want to believe that you didn’t. Then you hesitated; and now you know, but you remain silent. Eight years of silence are degrading. But it was all in vain: right now, the blinding sun of torture is at the high noon position, flooding the entire country with its light, and there is no laughter that sounds good under that light, no face that can put on enough makeup to hide its anger or its fright, no act that fails to betray our repugnance and our complicity. It suffices nowadays for two Frenchmen to run into each other, and a corpse gets right between them. France used to be the name of a country. We should be careful lest it becomes, in 1961, the name of a neurosis". Where he says "eight years" lets substitute "thirty-five"; where he says France, let’s write Israel or--it doesn’t matter--the world. Israel could manage to become a country, but it prefers to be a neurosis; the world could manage to become a planet ("an infinite unity of reciprocities", says Sartre) but it prefers to be a psicopathy. Will we heal? Humanity, like psychoanalysts, must deal with--must continue to deal with--the Holocaust. But history, Law, people... they must deal with the pain of everyday, they must seek accountability for each new atrocity, must try to prevent the future bloodbaths. They must occupy themselves with the Occupation. It does not matter if the Israelis aren’t Nazis: they are the murderers; and it does not matter if the Palestinians aren’t Jews: they are the victims. Neurosis does not distinguish past from present, reality from fiction, war from peace, the guilty from the innocent. Healing means drawing those lines, reestablishing borders, establishing rules. Without that minimum of sanity, it will not be worth it for the world to continue after the next war. >>>>Think about it. ========= what is with you peepull doesnt allow doing (english) piet 2:59am Sun Apr 21 '02 comment#174544 a regular homo maroccan columnist in holland gives an honest account of his discouragement over last week's 20 thousand heads strong propalestina protest. He 'fears for his country' (instead of actively emulating the succesfull neighbourhood father project rite here in A'dam and participating. He only watched part of it cause it was in his way and cites a huge maroccan who found it to cold to participate. Conclusion he projects desillusion with his own apathy on the country. This last weekend some jewfella is allowed to preach doom and gloom complete with giant mushroomcloudcartoon speculating (placing bets?) on telaviv as possible 'locale' rather than fess up about his stubborn refusal to radically rethink stuff. Arabs seem no better judging from the cyberistan.org/islamic site where you will look in vain for any beleaf in my sense of the word; no mention of greenery at all in fact. =========== Santiago! (english) Harq al-Ada 5:28am Sun Apr 21 '02 comment#174562 Santigo: as a fellow human being---I SALUTE YOU! ---------------------- http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo-talk/0204/2192.html RE: Russian anti-Semitism From: ChrisD(RJ) (chrisd@russiajournal.com < TITLE="mailto:chrisd@russiajournal.com Date: Sat Apr 20 2002 - 07:17:33 EDT Next message: ChrisD(RJ): "Vladimir Lenin convicted of fraud" <2193.html> Previous message: ChrisD(RJ): "RE: Russian anti-Semitism" <2191.html> Maybe in reply to: Charles Brown: "Russian anti-Semitism" <2167.html> Solzhenistsyn recently wrote a book about this subject. Chris Doss The Russia Journal ---- National Review Sept 17, 2001 Solzhenitsyn, Still: The writer and his latest challenge.(Two Hundred Years Together)(Review) Author/s: Jay Nordlinger Because Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is one of the great men of the 20th century, it is possible to overlook how prolific and varied he has been as a writer. In his 82 years, he has produced historical novels, "regular" novels, novellas, short stories, "two-part stories," poems, prose poems, plays, autobiographical memoirs, literary memoirs, political essays, philosophical essays, speeches, and that unique, world-shattering book called The Gulag Archipelago, which the author described as "an experiment in literary investigation." And now he has produced a history: Two Hundred Years Together, a chronicle of "Russian-Jewish interrelations" from 1795 to 1995. The first volume of this work has just appeared in Russia; more will come out in a matter of months. Thus does Solzhenitsyn continue to work, comfort, and incite. It was in 1990, when he was still in his Vermont exile, that Solzhenitsyn completed The Red Wheel, his weighty cycle of novels on the Russian Revolution. While preparing these books, he found that he bumped up repeatedly against "the Jewish question," the role of Jews in Russian history and in what might be called the Russian mind. Yet he did not want to explore this question in The Red Wheel, because it is an incendiary one, and because he did not wish to give the cycle the wrong "accent" or "slant." If he had gone deeply into the Jewish question, this may well have engulfed the entire work, causing people to see or argue over nothing else. But he knew the importance of the question, and was reluctant to leave it unaddressed. So he devoted much of the time between 1990 and 2001-essentially the years of his seventies-to Two Hundred Years, to this business of the Russians and the Jews. Which has puzzled more than a few people. Why, they ask, would Solzhenitsyn dabble in this, allotting precious time-twilight time-to this subject, of all the subjects under the sun? David Remnick, in a recent piece in The New Yorker, expressed his own puzzlement, saying that "there are books in Solzhenitsyn's uvre that are arguably dull or minor but never tangential." The new history, he wrote, "seems anomalous, not at all essential." Many others wish that Solzhenitsyn had never gone near this book for other reasons, which we will take up shortly. But we should at least consider that Solzhenitsyn himself is the best judge of how he ought to spend his time, of what his service should be, of what is important in his writing about Russia, and for Russia, and what is not. Puzzled-even annoyed-as some people may be, the mere fact that Solzhenitsyn thinks this work important should be enough to arrest us and make us think a little along with him. The author has made abundantly clear that he did not wish to write this book-far from it. As he says in his Introduction, "I never lost hope that there would come before me a writer who might illumine for us all [the Russian-Jewish question], generously and equitably. . . . I would be glad not to test my strength in such a thorny thicket . . . For many years, I postponed this work and would even now be pleased to avert the burden of writing it. But my years are nearing their end, and I feel I must take up this task." But why? Does "the Jewish question" in Russia burn across the landscape, requiring a quenching? Again, Solzhenitsyn speaks well for himself: "What leads me through this narrative . . . is a quest for points of common understanding, and for paths into the future, cleansed from the acrimony of the past. . . . Alas, mutual grievances have accumulated in both peoples' memories, but if we repress the past, how can we heal them? Until the collective psyche of a people finds its clear outlet in the written word, it can rumble indistinctly or, worse, menacingly." These words were translated by Solzhenitsyn's son Stephan, who lives in Boston. (The book is not yet available in English; Stephan has translated key parts of it.) Another son, Ignat, lives in Philadelphia, and a third, Yermolai, is in Moscow. The sons, along with their mother, Natalia, have participated heavily in the making of the book, helping Solzhenitsyn with such chores as typing (he writes by hand), research, quote-checking, footnoting, and indexing. Rarely has a man been so lucky in his family as Solzhenitsyn has. All are touchingly devoted to him, committed to his work, understanding of his purposes, willing to make sacrifices. It was perhaps the circumstances of exile, and of Solzhenitsyn's unique position in the world, that forged such bonds. The family, like the author, would have preferred that this project not go forward, with all its sundry headaches, and perils-but each one accepted the need for it. Elaborating on his father's words, Ignat says that the new history is meant to "bring us back to the past, make us care about it, and own up to it." National Review, he points out-particularly senior editor David Pryce-Jones-is always calling for an honest accounting of the past, if only for the sake of the present and future (in fact, only for that). This, says Ignat, is part of what Two Hundred Years should do. Ideally, it will occasion a kind of "collective repentance," or at least reflection. The Solzhenitsyn view goes essentially as follows: For ages, Russian nationalists have blamed Jews for all sorts of woes, chiefly the 75 years of Communist rule; others, meanwhile, have ignorantly or maliciously damned the (pre-Bolshevik) Russian state, the Russian people, and "Russianness" itself. Solzhenitsyn attempts to be an arbiter (and it is this very "evenhandedness" that will bother many critics). The new book is meant to be largely devoid of art or argument, presenting this history in a dispassionate, factual, even dry way. In a recent interview with Moscow News, Solzhenitsyn said, "I could not have written this book had I not absorbed myself in both sides." Much has been made, over the years, of Solzhenitsyn's sense of "destiny," his "prophetic" mission to bring people, particularly Russians, to the truth, about any number of things. Ignat Solzhenitsyn, for one, believes that this portrait is overblown. His father, he says, is hardly the megalomaniac of myth, but a humble man, although with an acute sense of responsibility to others. We have seen that Solzhenitsyn says he was loath to write the Russian-Jewish book, hoping that someone else-such as someone younger and less precariously situated-would step up to the job. No less is true, according to Ignat, of The Gulag Archipelago and The Red Wheel. Solzhenitsyn, this artist, a man who has burned for literature ever since he was a child, would have preferred to be left with his stories and poems and so on. But he has always accepted the writer's duty to serve as a "second government," a duty especially important when the first government is a brutal and dishonest one. Solzhenitsyn has been left with political and historical work, his son insists, "by default." Everyone-family, admirers, detractors-agrees on one point: A book treating "the Jewish question" was the last thing Solzhenitsyn needed. The author has been dogged for many years by charges of anti-Semitism, charges that have nibbled at his reputation, that have planted doubt even in those who, on the whole, revere the man. How did these charges come about? As Solzhenitsyn's books were published, certain critics thought they discerned in some of them one type of anti-Semitism or another. Most of the accusations, and doubts, are absurd. For example, it was said that the novel Cancer Ward (1968) had in it no Jewish doctors, and how could that be? Was Solzhenitsyn denying the Jewish role in Russian medicine? Had he concocted a little doctors plot of his own? The book, of course, includes a Jewish doctor, a prominent character named Lev Leonidovich, no less. The novel, like others by Solzhenitsyn, is based on the author's own experiences, and he has always told it "straight," say his defenders, even in his fiction. Solzhenitsyn has been attacked both for identifying his characters as Jewish and for not doing so. David Remnick, in his New Yorker piece, wrote truthfully and piquantly when he said, "In the seventies, some third-rate critics seemed to encounter [Solzhenitsyn's] books with an accountant's pencil, tallying up 'positive' and 'negative' portraits of Jews . . ." He then said, "Solzhenitsyn, in fact, is not anti-Semitic; his books are not anti- Semitic, and he is not, in his personal relations, anti-Jewish . . ." (which is certainly incontestable). And yet, Solzhenitsyn has left a few openings for suspicion. His depiction of the historical Parvus, in the book Lenin in Zurich, recalls a hoary anti-Jewish stereotype: the "innate" drive for money. While this may have been true of Parvus as an individual, it gave many readers pangs. So did the writer's handling of the terrorist Bogrov, assassin of the prime minister, Stolypin, in August 1914. Not everyone who has muttered about Solzhenitsyn has been a leftist out to tarnish the world's indispensable anti-Communist. One of the most remarkable and searching essays ever written about Solzhenitsyn was by Norman Podhoretz, "The Terrible Question of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn" (Commentary, February 1985). William F. Rickenbacker, a late senior editor of National Review, wrote that this essay was simply "one of the finest things I've ever seen." The piece is not primarily about the Jewish issue, but it does touch on it, as when Podhoretz says, "I can well imagine that in his heart [Solzhenitsyn] holds it against the Jews that so many of the old Bolsheviks, the makers of the Revolution that brought the curse of Communism to Russia, were of Jewish origin . . ." Yet Podhoretz is ultimately a defender of Solzhenitsyn, on this question as on others. He has long stressed the fact that Solzhenitsyn is a powerful supporter of Israel, and that, in our times, anti-Semitism has characteristically found expression in hostility to the Jewish state. Indeed, Solzhenitsyn admires Israel not only "politically," but morally, holding it out as an example of the ability of human beings to resist evil. There have been times-in the recent Moscow News interview, for instance-when Solzhenitsyn has sounded positively philo-Semitic. And it is true that, back in Soviet days, the authorities tried to discredit him by putting out the word that he was, in fact, a secret Jew: real name, "Solzhenitser." In addition, his middle name, or patronymic, Isayevich, looks to some people Jewish, though it is not. It is, of course, a measure of just what anti-Semitism is, or was, in Russia that a government desperate to defame its strongest opponent would call him a Jew. Many in the West, conditioned to hearing that Solzhenitsyn is a "Slavophile," a "right-wing nationalist," a "theocrat," and so on, would be surprised to learn that he has vicious enemies on the right in Russia, who regard him as a tool of Western, or CIA, or Jewish interests. On this nettlesome question of Solzhenitsyn and the Jews, I myself cannot improve on something my colleague Pryce-Jones says: "Look, just read The Gulag Archipelago. In it we find a moral sense that is too strong to be adjustable on the Jewish question." Solzhenitsyn's apprehension of the dignity of man is not divisible. We should remember, too, that Solzhenitsyn has never cared what his critics had to say about him. This is one of the qualities that make him a peculiar writer, and person. For many years, he did not read a single word that his critics wrote. As Ignat Solzhenitsyn puts it, he could have written The Red Wheel or kept up with his critics, but not both. One time, however, in 1983, he did sit down to his critics, reading their complaints and broadsides in one fell swoop. He then answered them in a biting essay published in a Paris-based Russian- language journal. He has done nothing like it since. Similarly, Solzhenitsyn has always disdained public relations. To the occasional exasperation of his admirers, he has never lifted a finger to make himself popular, never "minded" his language, never held the hands, so to speak, of those who misunderstood him. He never tried to win anyone over, except through the force of his work, and perhaps not even in that. He would rebuff leading journalists in the West because he found their questions immature. After all that he had seen, suffered, and sacrificed, he did not feel the need to justify himself. While he is largely immune to personal criticism, he is very-extremely- sensitive to criticism of Russia and the Russians, meaning, to criticism that he regards as unfounded. In fact, it may be said that he takes such criticism personally. People will no doubt see in his new history a defensiveness about Russia and some of the historic accusations made against it. Because he is eager to clear his country and compatriots of what he considers slander against them-even as he holds them to account, in his usual unsparing way, for what he judges their wrongs-he will provide fodder for those prepared to believe that there is something ugly or resentful about him. Some of the book, from what I have been able to review, will ring disconsonantly in the Western, certainly in the American, ear. Solzhenitsyn, who has often been called an "ancient man"-and in a complimentary way-does not conform to modern sensitivities. But the honesty and honor of his effort should be undeniable. Two Hundred Years has been fairly well received in Russia, prompting symposiums, numerous reviews, letters to the editor, and the like. Many have thanked the author for daring to tackle this theme, and for providing the basis for a reasoned public discussion. An editor at Izvestia may have been typical when he wrote, before reading the book, "I would have preferred that Solzhenitsyn had not undertaken this." Afterward, however, with some relief and gratitude, he pronounced the work "extremely important for the healing and normalization of Russian social thought." Podhoretz, in his 1985 essay, said the following about The Gulag Archipelago and The Oak and the Calf (Solzhenitsyn's literary memoirs): "[The writer] is returning [to the Russian people] their stolen or 'amputated' national memory, reopening the forcibly blocked channels of communication between the generations, between the past and the present . . ." This serves beautifully as a description of what Solzhenitsyn believes himself doing in his latest, "thorny" (as he says) endeavor. Few appreciative people would dispute that the author has earned the right to any book he deems vital. Malcolm Muggeridge declared him to be "the noblest human being alive." I myself can only offer the conclusion that at the core of Solzhenitsyn's life's work is love. He is sometimes portrayed as a crabbed and angry hermit-and righteous anger he surely has-but his many writings over the decades have plainly been motivated by love: by love of mankind and a determination to lift it up. It is hard to do better than that. ---------- --- COPYRIGHT 2001 National Review, Inc. in association with The Gale Group and LookSmart. COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group ----------------- I haven't read the book, and probably never will, but I do know Sol. preserves the distinction between the "Russians" and "Jews" and points out that ordinary Russians have suffered just as much historically as Russian Jews (he may have a point there, what with most Russians up until the mid 1800s having basically been slaves). Sol. is not known in Russia as an anti-Semite. He's known as a lot of other things -- hack, pompous ass, traitor, society's conscience, back-to-tsarism lunatic, irrelevant anachronism, depending on the person -- but not as an anti-Semite. This puts me in mind of one of those anecdotes I'm fond of recounting: I was, um, imbibing with a friend of mine, a Russian artist in his early 40s, when we began talking about Sol. He said, "I remember back in the 70s Solzhenitsyn could do no wrong. But then I read an American magazine that had somehow been smuggled into the country, and Solzhenitsyn was basically arguing for a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union. And I thought to myself, 'Alexander Isayevich is whoring himself to the Americans. I can understand that, he's a father and he wants money for his children. But you know what? I'm a father too. So my children should die so his can have piano lessons. Fuck you, Solzhenitsyn." Chris Doss The Russia Journal BTW, despite all the build-up, there hasn't been any violence yet, to my knowledge. Of course, what they are worried about in Moscow is the big Spartak soccer match today (the violence at the Tsaratyno market last year took place after a soccer match). Also BTW, Putin called for greater vigilance against racially motivated violence in his State of the Nation speech on Thursday. -- Chris Doss The Russia Journal ------------------ Book Review The Iron Wall: Zionist Revisionism from Jabotinsky to Shamir By Lenni Brenner. London: Zed Books Ltd., 1984. 221 pp. $14.95 (paperback) Reviewed by Robert G. Hazo September 17, 1984, Page 10 Over the years Israel has moved relentlessly towards the political right, towards an interpretation of Zionism known as Revisionism. As a result, Israel has become more overtly expansionist, more willing to rely on force as its principal policy towards the Arabs (as the unprovoked, brutal invasion of Lebanon clearly showed), more willing to oppress Arabs living under Israeli rule and more willing to become "theocratic" --at least in social legislation. Because these trends show every sign of increasing, one cannot dismiss as aberrational Rabbi Meir Kahane's contention that what he represents is the wave of Zionism's future. lie may, in fact, be Zionism's logical heir. Lenni Brenner's new book, The Iron Wall, is an account of how Revisionism has become the mainstream dogma within Israel. It is a very long and complicated story. Given the apparently endless sequence of relevant events taking place on four continents during a period of over three quarters of a century, Brenner took on a formidable task. He discharges it with confidence and in the process displays remarkable erudition, considering the vast and varied literature on the subject (including his own earlier work, Zionism in the Age of Dictators). An Impressive Narrative This narrative is truly impressive for the amount of information it presents, the range of sources on which it draws and the remarkable level of detail it encompasses, among other things. No one interested in the subject can fail to learn something by reading it. Brenner has chosen to present this mass of information in a surprisingly brief format rather than to produce a definitive or comprehensive work. He gets a lot into fifteen chapters divided into short thematic sub-sections, but, inevitably, a lot more is given short shrift. Indeed, to profit fully from what Brenner has written, the reader must have some familiarity with the history of Zionism as a whole. One reason that The Iron Wall, falls short is that Brenner has chosen to present his historical monograph as biography, as his sub-title, "Zionist Revisionism from Jabotinsky to Shamir," suggests. Attention is essentially devoted to the development, character and actions of two personalities: Vladimir Jabotinsky, leader of the Revisionists, and former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Yitzhak Shamir also was accorded a short chapter simply because he inherited the leadership of the Likud party and became Israel's Prime Ministerafter Begin retired. This approach does illuminate these two personalities in special ways, but the biographical focus is so sharp that the circumstantial penumbra that would provide the necessary perspective and historical dimension is sorely neglected. Despite this deficiency, the portraits of Jabotinsky (clearly the more interesting of the two) and Begin--and the character of Revisionist Zionism as reflected by them--come across as both clear and damning. So palpable was their lifelong extremism that even David Ben Gurion, one of Israel's founding fathers and its first prime minister, did not hesitate to liken them both to Hitler. They were, however, quite different. Jabotinsky, the linguist, cosmopolitan and litterateur, converted to Zionism, was a manipulator, an opportunist, a natural leader and a grand strategist par excellence. Begin, the pedantic lawyer, born to Zionism, amounts to little more than a Jabotinsky devotee, a rigid idealogue and relentless tactician. After his election in 1977, he himself admitted that he never expected that he would or could have become Israel's Prime Minister. Jabotinsky's failure and Begin's success, then, is most accurately attributed to timing, to Begin's presence at the time of the historical maturation of Zionism rather than to a disparity in their political abilities. Differing Degrees of Zionism The most important conclusion that emerges from The Iron Wall, (which Brenner himself never quite succinctly draws) is that, except for its anti-Socialist, anti-union economic policy, Zionist Revisionism and Zionism proper have differed largely in degree rather than kind. Jabotinsky had a more audacious vision and was more candid than other Zionist leaders. He founded the Haganah because he believed that the use of Jewish force would be necessary not only to establish a national home in Palestine, but also to sustain it by subjugating the local population. In fact, the title of Brenner's book is derived from Jabotinsky's metaphor for invincible force--the iron wall. Despite his strategic mistakes, Jabotinsky saw that Israel needed a major power sponsor indefinitely. (He thought it would be Imperial Britain with Israel "a loyal Jewish Ulster" rather than America with Israel as "the bastion of democracy in the Middle East.") He knew that Israel as a colonial movement in an unfriendly environment would fall back on Jewish solidarity, exclusivity, or "racism", if you wish, and said so. By the 1930s, when Zionism became a movement of some magnitude, most Zionist leaders also knew these things, though they were not willing to admit them. Arabophilism was never a major thrust among Zionists, just as "Peace Now" is not now a major force in Israel. Brenner's book makes clear how and why Zionism has taken the unfortunate direction in which it is now heading. Robert G. Haze is chairman of the Middle East Policy Association. ------------------------- The Two US-Afghan Wars Lenni Brenner © Ted Rall, Universal Press Syndicate Lenni Brenner: Zionism in the Age of the Dictators - A Reappraisal (1983) Lenni Brenner: The Iron Wall - Zionist Revisionism from Jabotinsky to Shamir (1984) In every military conflict, it is crucial to study the etiology, the 1st causes & early stages that developed into the contemporary clash. The past is the structural girding of the ever-passing present & future. "War is nothing but the continuation of politics by other means." Karl von Clausewitz's profundity, taught in every serious military academy, must be always in mind, when analyzing terrorism & the establishments it attacks. Islamic fundamentalism obviously has native roots in Afghanistan. However, it was dramatic political events in neighboring Pakistan & Iran, & even further away in Saudi Arabia & Egypt, that set the stage for the development of fundamentalism as a modern political & military world power. After losing Bangladesh in 1972, the prime fear of the Pakistani military was that Pashto-dominated Afghanistan would agitate Pakistan's North-West Frontier province Pashtos on a nationalist basis & bring down the battered regime. After his 1977 coup, General Zia ul-Haq grasped that fundamentalism, in both countries, was the only ideological alternative to the nationalists & Stalinists. He provided funds for Pakistani Koran-thumping schools, & a haven for Afghan fundamentalists, already in conflict with the semi-modernizing government in Kabul, even before the native Stalinists & military seized power in 1978. When Washington pitched intervention into Afghanistan, Zia was in place to play catcher. From The Village Voice, USA, December 4th 2001 To Afghanistan's west, the February 1979 downfall of the Shah of Iran, then America's pivotal native satrap in the Persian Gulf, at the hands of Shia Islam, opened Muslim minds, everywhere, to the possibility of doing something similar in their own countries, even tho most Muslims, in Afghanistan & the world, are Sunni, & the 2 groups' theologians see each other as heretics. On the East, stood Maoist China, with relentlessly hostility to the Soviet Union governing its policy towards Kabul. This was the regional matrix in 1979, when Jimmy Carter & Zbigniew Brzezinski covertly intervened on the side of Afghani Sunni fundamentalists in rebellion against the native Stalinist regime, which came to power via a 1978 coup, in alliance with military elements, without coaching by Moscow. Washington's policy was driven by global cold war considerations, without serious concern for the direct consequences for Afghan society of that strategy. Subsequently, in 1988, Ronald Reagan worked a deal whereby Soviet troops withdrew from the country in 1989, & the US stopped arming its mujahedeen holy warriors. In 1992, the fanatics, already armed to the teeth, with stinger rockets that could bring down planes, brought down Muhammad Najibullah's isolated regime. Saudi Arabian Wahabbi intervention, personified in Osama bin Laden, was the 3rd crucial ingredient for Reagan's success in driving Moscow out. The guardians of Mecca provided theological respectability to the struggle vs. the "atheist" modernists in Kabul. So constituted, according to Reagan's "Afghanistan Day" proclamation of March 21, 1983, "The resistance of the Afghan freedom fighters is an example to all the world of the invincibility of the ideals we in this country hold most dear, the ideals of freedom and independence." Yes, indeed. Bin Laden, then pro-Saudi dynasty, recruited more technologically advanced youthful ultras from Saudia & elsewhere in the Arab & Muslim worlds. Utilization of fundamentalism against secularism, in its nationalist & anti-capitalist forms, was also the policy of Anwar Sadat's Egyptian state bureaucracy, threatened by left-populist currents still strong in that country, with its history of struggles against British imperialism & then Zionism. In 1980, Sadat eagerly contributed Kalashnickov assault rifles, given to Egypt by the USSR, to the gallant "Afghan freedom fighters," against the Soviets. (To make this blowback epic complete, Sadat was later assassinated by - you guessed right - Islamic fundamentalists, tho I could not say, even with a gun to my head, if they did it with a Kalashnickov.) © Rob Rogers, (from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, USA), Universal Press Syndicate The combined interveners defeated the mighty Soviet army, producing a triumphalist mentality in bin Laden & cothinkers in the Islamic world. When the US sent Christian & Jewish troops into Saudia in 1990-91, to protect the dynasty against Saddam Hussein, bin Laden saw them as puppets of infidels, & ideologically took off from Saudi-loyalty to land ultimately in Afghanistan & theological-political madness. The sword of Allah, who helped bring down the mighty Soviet army, confident in his sectarian triumphalism,

turned on the power that provided his Sunni fundamentalists with the sinews of modern militarism, without which his medievalism couldn't have come to power. The best analogy to the relationship between Washington & bin Laden is that of Germany's capitalists to Adolf Hitler in 1929-33. They were looking for an anti-Marxist kickass as Germany entered the world Depression. They weren't thinking about killing almost 6 million Jews. But that's what happened when they looked to a right-wing militarized fanatic for the solution to their problems. Carter & Reagan needed a homicidal holy warrior against the Soviet Union. While neither was exactly a feminist, domestically, they weren't motivated by personal anti-feminism in backing Afghanistan's world class male-chauvinists. But, in arming those women-haters, they set in train a chain of political forces that produced one of history's major disasters, for America, Afghanistan & the world. Be certain that the bulk of voters, in 1980-88, never gave a thought to what the Democrats & Republicans they voted for were doing in Afghanistan. For decades, polls have shown that only a small minority of Americans follow US foreign policy, if Americans aren't being killed. Most Americans, then & up to 9/11, knew nothing or next to nothing about Afghanistan. No mincing words, no evasions, no hypocrisy: The best argument against the possibility of democracy in Afghanistan, & in the larger Islamic world, is its utter failure here, & no better example of that miscarriage could be imagined than the easy time that the White House had, getting military aid to Islamic fundamentalism passed by a Congress full of Christian & Jewish cynics. No political crisis in modern times has better illustrated the massive gap between the informed, regardless of their politics, & the vast majority of unpolitical Americans, than 9/11. The quality media, the NY Times & Co., constantly referred to the previous US involvement with the fundamentalists. Many commentators saw the situation as a prime example of "blowback," i.e., the belated consequences of opportunist CIA involvement with anti-Stalinist criminals, mad-dogs off the leash. With that in mind, they documented the sordid history of America's present "white hats," & gave us an unprecedented low-blow-by-low-blow account of their present crimes. In general, the informed understand that the US is now confronted with severe problems in establishing a stable regime in Afghanistan, to say nothing about & the larger questions involved in Washington's spiraling entanglement with the wider Muslim world. On the other hand, the masses alternate between childlike patriotism & paranoia. We have all seen street peddlers selling red, white & blue baby socks. But, at the same time, many of many of their customers are afraid to go into tall buildings, & air travel is massively off, even months later. What unites the 2 contrasting attitudes is the traumatic quality of the public reaction. I remember Pearl Harbor, & every war since. The Japanese attack was a surprise, but the country then matter of factly went to war. Within days, fear of a direct air attack on California was replaced with mature concern for German U-boat attacks on coastal shipping, etc. Presently, there is a free floating anxiety further generated by anthrax mail, copycat terrorism, as with the kid in Florida who crashed his plane into a building, false bomb threats & the like. The ignorant are looking for a savior. In some cases literal theological intervention, in others, they are making heroes out of cops, firemen, even Rudy Giuliani. But the informed,  especially in New York, are also deeply effected. They can't go back readily to politics as usual, try as they will. For them, now, its, for example, in NYC, politics as she has been effected by 9/11 & its consequences. © Kal (fromThe Baltimore Sun, USA), Cartoonists & Writers Syndicate This provides the crucial avenue for the anti-war movement to reach both the sophisticated & the great politically unwashed. But only if it cleans up its act. Millions of Muslims around the world believed that "the Zionists did it," that thousands of Israelis were told to stay away from the WTC on 9/11, etc. But even here in the US we heard such nonsense, in some Arab political circles, & even, to a lesser degree, in the general American anti-war movement. Certainly there was a widespread conviction, at least in the early days of the crisis, that "Bush hasn't made his case that bin Laden did it." These absurdities reflected the changes in the internal character of the Middle East anti-war movement over the last 20 years. In 1982, when the Israelis let the Lebanese Phalangists enter Sabra & Shatilla to slaughter hundreds of Palestinians, no one doubted that the Phalangists did it. Indeed, even before that atrocity, the movement here was against "Zionism, US imperialism & Arab reaction." Focus on the Arab right diminished sharply after the Oslo accords. When a basically new movement evolved, after the obvious failure of that pact, it rested, primarily, on a new stratum of young Palestinians, who were born or raised here. The new cadre had little or no 1st hand experience of life in the larger Arab world, & not much sustained concern for the internal politics of that milieu, except in so far as it touched directly on the Palestine issue. Generic Palestinian nationalism replaced Arab nationalism as the broad ideology of the movement here. Thus there was virtually no discussion of the gigantic Berber demonstrations in Algeria, & no discussion of the chronic civil war in the Sudan. There was a degree of solidarity work against the ongoing monstrous social carnage in Iraq, caused by the US stranglehold on its economy, but no discussion of the internal politics of the country, ruled by a once secular despot, who, his regime announced, then gave 50 pints of his own blood as ink for a Koran. Given inattention to the broader Arab nation, there was no discussion of fundamentalism, except within the Palestinian movement, re Hamas & Islamic Jihad, & not much discussion of them. The focus was on Zionist oppression, & Arafat's reaction to it, not the internal quality of Palestinian & Arab politics. Therefore, when the towers & the Pentagon were hit by suicide bombers, the broad movement here was as shocked by those profound events, as the general public, & likewise reacted emotionally. Many Arab-Americans feared they would be rounded up, as Arabs &/or as politicals. When TV showed Palestinians cheering the destruction, many convinced themselves that the photos were staged. Some may have been, in the age-old way of photographers everywhere. But, for certain, many did cheer. But soon we saw emails about Israelis arrested cheering the destruction in NY, Israelis with boxcutters on the George Washington Bridge, & Co. The professional psychological terms for this are simple enough: Denial & projection. Most American lefts were not ethnically fearful of retaliation for suicide bombers, so few, beyond congenital Kennedy conspiracy buffs like Ralph Schoenman, are into "the Zionists did it." But we saw a subtle form of "Bush did it." There were demonstration planning meetings in NY, which began with a minute of silence for the victims at the WTC, & then the focus of attention was on stopping Bush's war, not bin Laden's. In this matrix, emails flew about, re gas in &/or pipelines through Afghanistan. There is gas in Afghanistan. But neither the Soviets nor Carter nor Reagan nor his successors based their politics on this. There is more accessible gas elsewhere. And the oil industry knows that the cheapest & quickest way to get Caspian oil & gas to the world market is with a pipeline through Iran, not Afghanistan. Forgive the expression, but Marxist fundamentalists reduce a complex event to familiar terms, in this case, imperialism. However Bush didn't bomb the Pentagon. Bin Laden did. Bush reacted to that. In so doing, he was America, the political-military conjurer, trying to get his monster, armed religious fanaticism, back into the magician's top hat. He wasn't looking for gas, any more than he is looking to get in the middle between Pakistan & India. These & other substitutes for reality take attention away from studying the undisputed facts of the situation. But if we look clinically at the history of US-Afghan politics we immediately see the primordial flaw built into Washington's position, post-1979, which must be confronted by everyone, in our post 9/11 here & now. © Chip Bok (from the Akron Beacon Journel, USA), Creators Syndicate Two things are unmistakable: Arming male chauvinist religious fanatics against the pro-Soviet, but also feminist, Kabul regime was criminal. It can't be defended, as such, today. Establishing now a "reformed" remake of the pre-Taliban male chauvinist regime, where women are "almost" equal, will also be a criminal act. Carter got away with his war crime because the vast majority of feminist leaders then looked to the Democratic Party for defense & extension of female equality here. They weren't peeking very hard at any aspect of his foreign policy, much less his Afghan policies. Later, they knew the Democrats defended the Saudi male-chauvinists, straight through Clinton's affair with Monica. But we are discussing identity-politicians, narcissists, essentially, whose politics reflected that syndrome. For them, the political stage is local & national, at most, because governmental policies at those levels effect them. Feminism as an international cause, refusing to vote for a domestically pro-abortion party, because it arms male chauvinists abroad, was beyond them. Ignoring Democratic male chauvinist foreign policy, they were in no great haste to go after it under Republicans. Now, after 9/11, Afghanistan & Saudi Arabia will be the news for a long time to come. They can't be ignored. Gloria Steinem, an ex-CIA collaborator, then a mindless celebrity member of Democratic Socialists of America, a Democratic Party outrider, has been on TV, talking about Afghan women's rights. How far will she go in the struggle for those rights? Given her morbid history, we have to wait & see. But, if we make international women's rights a litmus test issue for the public, we expose both parties in the "bipartisan" system in front of millions of young women here, who don't come with her baggage. Now, after the traumatic effect of 9/11, they can't ever go back to the parochial narcissism of their older sisters. Military women are stationed in Saudia & the Middle East. Every woman's tax money will go to building a new Afghan state. If they say no money to any regime that denies basic American style rights to women, you wouldn't want to get in their way if you were running for election. If we step on that pedal, equality for women is the issue that will force the informed to think through their politics to a profoundly anti-establishment position. At the same time, it is the road to the ignorant, those who knew nothing about Afghanistan before hand, & who have little understanding of it now, but who now at least know that it is important that they should. Underneath their present patriotism, they are practical feminists. In their language, "let's go guys, we're eating out tonight," or whatever, means all the boys & girls in their family. Its our duty & pleasure to show them that the US dumped on that great truth in the past in Afghanistan, & is doing it again. To be sure, there are many other facets to the Afghan situation. But the issue of women's rights is singularly central to its past, present & future. Now, after 9/11, Afghan women's rights, & Saudi women's rights, indeed women's rights everywhere, will become distinctly crucial in America's present &, be sure, its future. © Tom Tomorrow Washington has varying relationships with the host of "Islamic" governments, more properly, states whose populations are majority Muslim, from the Saudi guardians of Mecca, Shia Iran, through to rigidly separatist Turkey, & Malaysia, where ethnicity, not religion, are the basis for statehood, & their relationship to the outside world. There is even Surinam in South America, with its immigrant Muslim history. Therefore, any generality about America's future relationship with all of them is bound to be wrong. All but one: Neither official Washington nor official Islam will come out of their present relationships well. The proverb has it that fools outnumber the wise in every country in the world. As I write, that world's attention is focused on Islamic fanaticism, & correctly so. But there are 284 million Americans, 207 million adults, 18+, with the right to vote. Our natural history museums are complete with dinosaurs bones, scientifically certified to be millions of years old. Yet 46% of Americans, mostly Christians, believe that God created the world about ten thousand years ago. In 1969, Billy Graham, the most famous Protestant preacher of his time, told 20,000 people in Madison Square Garden that he believed that, after you die, if you are a Christian, God sends you, via extra-sensory perception, to other planets in the universe, to convert their heathen populations. When me & my ace photographer buddy asked each other if we were hearing right, our neighbors shushed us. We were in top row, side seats for the view of the audience. Trust me: We were the only skeptics in the crowd. Those folks were black & white. They voted for Hubert Humphrey, Vice President during the Vietnam war, or Nixon, later impeached for burglarizing the Democrats. In 2000, their contemporary Christian cothinkers, black & white, voted for Al Bore or George W. Mush, who recently told the world, including its 19.1% Muslims, that he was in a "crusade" against terrorism, i.e., their terrorism. Smart he ain't & smart isn't a word easily applied to American voters. We have entered a harrowing epoch, full of fanatic terrorists fighting wannabe Machiavellis, in front of political children of all ages. No one needs a prophet to know that many innocent names shall be stricken from the book of life before the world crisis is resolved. But those all too real facts can be humanity's political salvation. The knowledgeable, & those now open to knowledge, now have no choice but to confront those grotesque facts, dead on, as it were, and can rise to the occasion, and defeat both the holy warriors & the crusaders. ----------------------------- -------------- 175450 +10  A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT (english) Larry Miller 3:57pm Tue Apr 23 '02 As a service to all Americans who still don't get it, I now offer you the story of the Middle East in just a few paragraphs, which is all you really need. Don't thank me. I'm a giver. Here we go: The Palestinians want their own country. There's just one thing about that: There are no Palestinians. It's a made up word. Israel was called Palestine for two thousand years. Like "Wiccan," "Palestinian" sounds ancient but is really a modern invention. Before the Israelis won the land in war, Gaza was owned by Egypt, and there were no "Palestinians" then, and the West Bank was owned by Jordan, and there were no "Palestinians" then. As soon as the Jews took over and started growing oranges as big as basketballs, what do you know, say hello to the "Palestinians," weeping for their deep bond with their lost "land" and "nation." So for the sake of honesty, let's not use the word "Palestinian" any more to describe these delightful folks, who dance for joy at our deaths until someone points out they're being taped. Instead, let's call them what they are: "Other Arabs From The Same General Area Who Are In Deep Denial About Never Being Able To Accomplish Anything In Life And Would Rather Wrap Themselves In The Seductive Melodrama Of Eternal Struggle And Death." I know that's a bit unwieldy to expect to see on CNN. How about this, then: "Adjacent Jew-Haters." Okay, so the Adjacent Jew-Haters want their own country. Oops, just one more thing. No, they don't. They could've had their own country any time in the last thirty years, especially two years ago at Camp David. But if you have your own country, you have to have traffic lights and garbage trucks and Chambers of Commerce, and, worse, you actually have to figure out some way to make a living. That's no fun. No, they want what all the other Jew-Haters in the region want: Israel. They also want a big pile of dead Jews, of course--that's where the real fun is--but mostly they want Israel. Why? For one thing, trying to destroy Israel--or "The Zionist Entity" as their textbooks call it--for the last fifty years has allowed the rulers of Arab countries to divert the attention of their own people away from the fact that they're the blue-ribbon most illiterate, poorest, and tribally backward on God's Earth, and if you've ever been around God's Earth, you know that's really saying something. It makes me roll my eyes every time one of our pundits waxes poetic about the great history and culture of the Muslim Mideast. Unless I'm missing something, the Arabs haven't given anything to the world since Algebra, and, by the way, thanks a hell of a lot for that one. Chew this around and spit it out: Five hundred million Arabs; five million Jews. Think of all the Arab countries as a football field, and Israel as a pack of matches sitting in the middle of it. And now these same folks swear that if Israel gives them half of that pack of matches, everyone will be pals. Really? Wow, what neat news. Hey, but what about the string of wars to obliterate the tiny country and the constant din of rabid blood oaths to drive every Jew into the sea? Oh, that? We were just kidding. My friend Kevin Rooney made a gorgeous point the other day: Just reverse the numbers. Imagine five hundred million Jews and five million Arabs. I was stunned at the simple brilliance of it. Can anyone picture the Jews strapping belts of razor blades and dynamite to themselves? Of course not. Or marshalling every fiber and force at their disposal for generations to drive a tiny Arab state into the sea? Nonsense. Or dancing for joy at the murder of innocents? Impossible. Or spreading and believing horrible lies about the Arabs baking their bread with the blood of children? Disgusting. No, as you know, left to themselves in a world of peace, the worst Jews would ever do to people is debate them to death. add your own comments ======== One slight problem with that history (english) Mark Bialkowski 4:07pm Tue Apr 23 '02 mbialkowski@rogers.coMAPSBLOCK comment#175454 The Palestine Liberation Organization was formed in 1964, a full three years before the Six-Day War. If there were no Palestinians, then who was the Arab state in the 1948 partition plan intended for? And who populated Arab towns and villages before many were "ethnically cleansed" by proto-Israeli and Israeli forces from April 1, 1948 on? ========== A questions for Mark (english) Mike 4:22pm Tue Apr 23 '02 comment#175460 Let me ask you something Mark. If the PLO was formed in 1964 - 3 years before the "occupied territories" were occupied by Israel - what were the PLO trying to liberate? ========== Obivously... (english) Mark Bialkowski 4:34pm Tue Apr 23 '02 mbialkowski@rogers.coMAPSBLOCK comment#175465 What remained of "Palestine" - in short, replace Israel with a secular state. Numerous Arab towns and villages were overrun during the 1948 war, and the refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza resulted from those expulsions. I can find a map of what was overrun if you would like. Mind you, at first the charter included an exhortation to remove all of the Jews from Palestine, but that provision was edited out some time ago. Many, perhaps most Palestinians don't hate Jews, have no problem living alongside Jews, and are simply sick and tired of living as refugees and under occupation. At this point, the PLO/PNA is willing to settle for 22% of historical Palestine, and perhaps half (or a bit less) of what was intended for the Arab state at 1948 - the entire West Bank and Gaza. =========== Answers to Mark's questions (english) Mike 5:08pm Tue Apr 23 '02 comment#175478 To Mark Re: Your comments... "The Palestine Liberation Organization was formed in 1964, a full three years before the Six-Day War." Q. If there were no Palestinians, then who was the Arab state in the 1948 partition plan intended for? A. Prior to 1948 it is difficult to find any reference to Palestinian Arabs. In the newspapers and publications of the day the local Arab population were referred to as Arabs. In fact it was the local Jews who were referred to as Palestinian Jews. The Jewish newspaper was called The Palestine Post. Most Arabs saw the Palestine Mandate Territories as a province of Syria and not as a unique or seperate nation. The Jewish part of the Partition was for the indigenous Jews and the Arab portion of the partition was for the indigenous Arabs. Q. Who populated Arab towns and villages before many were "ethnically cleansed" by proto-Israeli and Israeli forces from April 1, 1948 on? A. No one is denying that by 1948 there was a local arab populace living in their own villages or amongst the Jewish population. There is also no one who questions the fact that there was a Jewish majority in the areas of the partition designated to the Jewish State. The question really surrounds your accusation of ethnic cleansing. The fact is the Palestinian Arabs (Henceforth referred to as Palestinians) left their homes in 1947-48 for a variety of reasons. Thousands of wealthy Arabs left in anticipation of a war, thousands more responded to Arab leaders' calls to get out of the way of the advancing armies, a handful were expelled, but most simply fled to avoid being caught in the cross fire of a battle. Had the Arabs accepted the 1947 UN resolution, not a single Palestinian would have become a refugee. An independent Arab state would now exist beside Israel. The responsibility for the refugee problem rests with the Arabs. The beginning of the Arab exodus can be traced to the weeks immediately following the announcement of the UN partition resolution. The first to leave were roughly 30,000 wealthy Arabs who anticipated the upcoming war and fled to neighboring Arab countries to await its end. Less affluent Arabs from the mixed cities of Palestine moved to all-Arab towns to stay with relatives or friends.6 By the end of January1948, the exodus was so alarming the Palestine Arab Higher Committee asked neighboring Arab countries to refuse visas to these refugees and to seal their borders against them.7 On January 30, 1948, the Jaffa newspaper, Ash Sha'ab, reported: "The first of our fifth-column consists of those who abandon their houses and businesses and go to live elsewhere....At the first signs of trouble they take to their heels to escape sharing the burden of struggle."8 Another Jaffa paper, As Sarih (March 30, 1948) excoriated Arab villagers near Tel Aviv for "bringing down disgrace on us all by 'abandoning the villages.'"9 Meanwhile, a leader of the Arab National Committee in Haifa, Hajj Nimer el-Khatib, said Arab soldiers in Jaffa were mistreating the residents. "They robbed individuals and homes. Life was of little value, and the honor of women was defiled. This state of affairs led many [Arab] residents to leave the city under the protection of British tanks."10 John Bagot Glubb, the commander of Jordan's Arab Legion, said: "Villages were frequently abandoned even before they were threatened by the progress of war."11 Contemporary press reports of major battles in which large numbers of Arabs fled conspicuously fail to mention any forcible expulsion by the Jewish forces. The Arabs are usually described as "fleeing" or "evacuating" their homes. While Zionists are accused of "expelling and dispossessing" the Arab inhabitants of such towns as Tiberias and Haifa, the truth is much different. Both of those cities were within the boundaries of the Jewish State under the UN partition scheme and both were fought for by Jews and Arabs alike. Jewish forces seized Tiberias on April 19, 1948, and the entire Arab population of 6,000 was evacuated under British military supervision. The Jewish Community Council issued a statement afterward: "We did not dispossess them; they themselves chose this course....Let no citizen touch their property."12 In early April, an estimated 25,000 Arabs left the Haifa area following an offensive by the irregular forces led by Fawzi al-Qawukji, and rumors that Arab air forces would soon bomb the Jewish areas around Mt. Carmel.13 On April 23, the Haganah captured Haifa. A British police report from Haifa, dated April 26, explained that "every effort is being made by the Jews to persuade the Arab populace to stay and carry on with their normal lives, to get their shops and businesses open and to be assured that their lives and interests will be safe."14 In fact, David Ben-Gurion had sent Golda Meir to Haifa to try to persuade the Arabs to stay, but she was unable to convince them because of their fear of being judged traitors to the Arab cause.15 By the end of the battle, more than 50,000 Palestinians had left. “Tens of thousands of Arab men, women and children fled toward the eastern outskirts of the city in cars, trucks, carts, and afoot in a desperate attempt to reach Arab territory until the Jews captured Rushmiya Bridge toward Samaria and Northern Palestine and cut them off. Thousands rushed every available craft, even rowboats, along the waterfront, to escape by sea toward Acre.â€� — New York Times, (April 23, 1948) In Tiberias and Haifa, the Haganah issued orders that none of the Arabs' possessions should be touched, and warned that anyone who violated the orders would be severely punished. Despite these efforts, all but about 5,000 or 6,000 Arabs evacuated Haifa, many leaving with the assistance of British military transports. Syria's UN delegate, Faris el-Khouri, interrupted the UN debate on Palestine to describe the seizure of Haifa as a "massacre" and said this action was "further evidence that the 'Zionist program' is to annihilate Arabs within the Jewish state if partition is effected."16 The following day, however, the British representative at the UN, Sir Alexander Cadogan, told the delegates that the fighting in Haifa had been provoked by the continuous attacks by Arabs against Jews a few days before and that reports of massacres and deportations were erroneous.17 The same day (April 23, 1948), Jamal Husseini, the chairman of the Palestine Higher Committee, told the UN Security Council that instead of accepting the Haganah's truce offer, the Arabs "preferred to abandon their homes, their belongings, and everything they possessed in the world and leave the town."18 The U.S. Consul-General in Haifa, Aubrey Lippincott, wrote on April 22, 1948, for example, that "local mufti-dominated Arab leaders" were urging "all Arabs to leave the city, and large numbers did so."19 An army order issued July 6, 1948, made clear that Arab towns and villages were not to be demolished or burned, and that Arab inhabitants were not to be expelled from their homes.20 The Haganah did employ psychological warfare to encourage the Arabs to abandon a few villages. Yigal Allon, the commander of the Palmach (the "shock force of the Haganah"), said he had Jews talk to the Arabs in neighboring villages and tell them a large Jewish force was in Galilee with the intention of burning all the Arab villages in the Lake Huleh region. The Arabs were told to leave while they still had time and, according to Allon, they did exactly that.21 In the most dramatic example, in the Ramle-Lod area, Israeli troops seeking to protect their flanks and relieve the pressure on besieged Jerusalem, forced a portion of the Arab population to go to an area a few miles away that was occupied by the Arab Legion. "The two towns had served as bases for Arab irregular units, which had frequently attacked Jewish convoys and nearby settlements, effectively barring the main road to Jerusalem to Jewish traffic."22 As was clear from the descriptions of what took place in the cities with the largest Arab populations, these cases were clearly the exceptions, accounting for only a small fraction of the Palestinian refugees. ========= Reply to Mark (english) Mike 5:14pm Tue Apr 23 '02 comment#175482 Mark Said: "At this point, the PLO/PNA is willing to settle for 22% of historical Palestine, and perhaps half (or a bit less) of what was intended for the Arab state at 1948 - the entire West Bank and Gaza." My response: Really?! Than why no counter offer at Camp David/Taba in 2000 - That factoid and the recent bloodbaths have convinced most Israeli's that the Palestinians don't want their own State they want to destroy the Jewish State. But Mark I must thank you, you are the first person on this site who hasn't excoriated me with anti-semitic remarks or bombarded mewith every possible variation of the "F word" that you can imagine. ======== Palestinians and Jews (english) Tom 6:38pm Tue Apr 23 '02 comment#175504 Mark; the PLO charter never contained phrases calling for the expulsion of all Jews -- only those who had come as settlers under the aegis of zionism after 1917. As to who are the Palestinians; well, if you are Christian or Jewish, go dust off that Bible and reread the old testament ... Abraham comes from his native Iraq and encounters a land full of people; Amalekites, Hittites, Hivites, Philistines, Canaanites, Kenites, Edomites, etc, etc .... Those are the ancestors of the Palestinians. All through the Bible there are exhortations to keep separate from the gentiles, the majority in ancient Palestine ... Those are the Palestinians (who also include the descendants of all those Jews who converted to Christianity or to Islam ... recall all the Christians of Jesus's time were of Jewish origin ... who do you think those Christians in Ramallah are anyway? Companions of Muhammmad????) No Palestinian political movement of any size calls for the removal of all Jews from Palestine -- all recognize the difference between historic Palestinian Jewish communities and the foreign colonists who have come from Europe and America, ===== Tom is lying (english) Job 7:49pm Tue Apr 23 '02 comment#175527 Tom you are either a fool or a liar. Palestinians are Arabs, with the same DNA, language, Religion, Culture and History. The biblical nations you mentioned (Amelakites, Hittites, Philistines, Jebusites, etc) are all extinct and have been for over 2000 years. ======== your writing is better than your argument (english) steve 8:03pm Tue Apr 23 '02 comment#175533 Larry You are a good writer but have a weak argument. Your argument boils down to two points: 1 That Israel can enter because the Palestinians are less 'developed' as a nation. BUT by this demented rationale, we can justify horrific events such as the invasion of the Americas by more 'advanced' Europeans. 2 That Israel is justified because it is a small country in the midst of large mass of arab countries. Imagine what would happen if Cuba decided to annex Rhode Island, because after all, it's just one tiny state in the big US of A? It's hardly a strong case. "The Law will never serve the lawless," no matter how good they spin it. ======= Shorter version that's TRUE (unlike the post) (english) Harq al-Ada 8:15pm Tue Apr 23 '02 comment#175540 The tribe Bara was living in the land of Enitselap. Tribe Nozi come and said: ``Hey, some people who we claim to be desdendants from, invaded this land like thousands of years ago, after God® promised it to them, then they got they ass kicked. We want to steal it back. Move over, or else...'' Bara people didn't want to leave from their land, so the or-else started. In 1948, Nozi people---after a campaign of terror against the Baras, got away and ivanded the land. Still, people of Bara, and their relatives and friends, never accepted it, and fight back. Nozis, backed by very powerful bullies with Big Clubs, won the fights and say ``Okay, I won, I take MORE land.'' And Nozis commited atrocities against the Baras, horrors beyond our imaginations (unless you are Nozi, that is). Baras still fight, with watever means they can get. So, we came to 2002. Nozi people has a new leader, Mr. I-Butcher. Mr. I-Butcher said: ``Hey, let's clean some more land.'' So they did. They `cleaned' many places. Ninej is one of those. Mr. I-Butcher is very happy, and his bully friends---like Mr. Pushy---still protect him with their Big Clubs (still bloody from smashing the heads of the Nahgfnas (lest serfs forget who's the boss, ``God dammit!''). So the corpses of thousands of Baras rot under the rubble, and the world look the other way (as Mr. Pushy's of the Big Club demands). Baras still fight, with watever means they can get. --------------------- 175673  The Beginning Of The End Of Jewish Post-War Ascendancy? (english) By Israel Shamir 3:08am Wed Apr 24 '02 The people of France have sent an important message to the world, by electing the traditionalist leader, Jean-Mari le Pen to the second round of the French presidential elections. It was not just a proof of general dissatisfaction, as NY Times claimed The first round occurred while the Jewish troops besieged the Church of Nativity, starved nuns, shot priests, and despoiled the land of Christ. Israeli bulldozers worked around the clock covering mass graves of their innocent victims in the Jenin refugee camp, Jewish soldiers destroyed churches and mosques in Nablus, shot at the Holy Virgin in Bethlehem, while one hundred fifty thousand Jews marched in Paris and elsewhere, supporting the genocide in Palestine. Waving Israeli flags and draped in the blue and white colours of their national banner (the tricolour is dropped and forgotten), the Jews marched from the Place de la République to the Place de la Bastille in Paris, chanting in French and Hebrew and carrying signs that read "Yesterday New York, today Jerusalem, tomorrow Paris." Today's Jerusalem is an unhappy city, its non-Jewish majority dispossessed, uprooted, pushed into ghetto and controlled by the brutal Jewish Border Police. Today's Jerusalem has the most advanced torture facilities, and there, thousands of kidnapped Palestinians are subjected to electric chocks, beating and humiliation. Today's Jerusalem is a place where only Jews can move freely and enjoy the fruits of civilisation. Should it be a model for tomorrow's Paris? Mais non, the people of France had experienced the German Nazi conquest in 1940s, and they did not want to try the Judeo-Nazi occupation. That was the main message sent by the French voter. We should thank General Sharon's brutality and ill-conceived solidarity of Jews in France with the génocidaire for this result. Until now, the Jews were divided in their tasks and purposes. In Palestine, they created a toxic, ferociously nationalist and religiously fanatic entity based on Hitler's Nuremberg Laws. Elsewhere, in France as well as in Britain, they promoted the pseudo-liberal paradigm of dismantling European national and cultural content in favour of the Judeo-American spirit. In Palestine, they shot at the church; in France, they undermined it by subterfuge. One law for themselves: extreme right wing nationalism of Sharon. Another law for the goyiim: liberal New Labour of Tony Blair. If the Jews would have sense, they would keep the inner dialectical unity of their pincer-movement attack as their best guarded secret. But they were inebriated by their successes. The spiritual teacher of Sephardic Jews, Rabbi Obadiah Joseph, ruled that Jews should not show their ascendancy in the world until they would be able to destroy the Christian Churches in the Holy Land. Now, with the Nativity besieged, they apparently felt the condition is fulfilled. Jews became united to an extent unknown since the days of Christ, and united by a common will, single purpose and a feeling of arriving to the pinnacle of power. Intoxication of power and unity caused the usually cautious people to drop masks, to leave pretences. It seems the Jews call out 'Kill him', as two thousand years ago. This new openness provided us with a previously unheard-of insight into the soul of the Jews and their supporters. An authentic Jewish voice, Ron Grossman of Chicago Tribune[i] wrote, "As a self-proclaimed humanist, I ought to recoil in horror from the thought of tanks rumbling through a city, anybody's city. My head should hang in sorrow at televised images of street fighting (rather, massacres - ISH) in Bethlehem and Ramallah. But here is a hint: Don't lecture or preach to us. Forget about appealing to our better selves". Please note this plural 'us' before denying the obvious. The Jews do not hide anymore behind the useful but dated device of "Americans, French or British citizens of Jewish faith". It is again The Jews, a single body with a single mind. Forget about appealing to their better selves, as they have not got any. 'The better selves' were just a device. "No one can express the aspirations of most Israelis like the prime minister. This is not a war that was waged by Sharon, the "warmonger," this is the war of all of us", reports Gideon Levy, a man of heart and conscience, who was recently banned from the pages of the 'liberal' Haaretz. (I was banned ten years ago. Welcome to the club, Gideon!) "It will also be very difficult to blame Sharon for the consequences of the war, in the light of the sweeping support he has been given by the majority of Israelis. Nearly 30,000 men were mobilized and they reported for duty as one man, making the refusal movement, with 21 refuseniks currently in jail, irrelevant". The Jews abroad were just as awful as those in Palestine. Professor David D. Perlmutter wrote in LA Times[ii]: "I daydream--if only! If in 1948, 1956, 1967 or 1973 Israel had acted just a bit like the Third Reich, then today Israelis would shop, eat pizza, marry and celebrate the holy days unmolested. And of course Jews, not sheiks, would have that Gulf oil'. Witty if snobbish Taki of the British weekly Spectator contributed the following anecdotal evidence of the new Jewish vehemence and single-mindedness: "On Easter Sunday, during lunch, the richest woman in Israel, Irit Lando[iii], suddenly burst into my house and began to harangue my friends and family about Adam Shapiro. Despite the fact she's one of my wife's oldest friends and was invited to drop in after lunch, I was extremely annoyed. I reminded Irit that my house was not Israeli occupied territory; that it was Easter; and knowing how I feel about the plight of the Palestinians, she should change the subject. Which she did, turning on the press, instead, and how they gave publicity to that godawful traitor Adam Shapiro". As few mavericks of Jewish origin like Adam Shapiro or marvellous Jennifer Loewenstein became increasingly marginalized, the Jews en masse rally to support Sharon and Israel. From Moscow to Brooklyn, from Marseille to Hampstead, the Jews speak in one voice. WE ARE ONE, proclaimed the headline of the Jewish Week. This vision of united, ready for the kill, Jewry could not but scare the French voter, and any thinking man. Le Pen was probably the only French politician totally opposed by the Jews. The French and the West European Left should learn the lesson before it is too late. Their liaison with the Jews became a liability and a source of embarrassment. Historically it was probably justified, but not any more. Even the Jewish stranglehold on media can not deliver the electoral goods. Instead of supporting Jewish agenda, the Left should compete with the Right by addressing problems of working class in the country and of the income disparity on the global scale. There should be no more immigration, and this task calls to stop the main creator of immigration, the unfair Judeo-American globalisation and Bush and Blair' s War against Islam. In the forthcoming May elections in the UK, the Left should give the boot to Michael Levy's protégé Tony Blair, and turn to the tradition of Michael Foot. The electoral success of Le Pen could signify the beginning of the end of the Jewish post-war ascendancy. Inverting the slogan of French Jews, we say, "Yesterday Paris, Today Washington, and Tomorrow Jerusalem". ___ www.rense.com/general24/dangerousliasons... ========== Isn't Le Pen anti-Muslim? (english) ??? 4:52am Wed Apr 24 '02 comment#175683 Le Pen has said plenty of anti-Jewish things in the past but he is also vehemently anti-immigrant and specifically anti-Muslim. He blames the increase in crime on Algerian and other Muslim immigrants for example. I've agreed with some of the stuff Shamir has written in the past but this article is muddled and distrubing: >>Instead of supporting Jewish agenda, the Left should compete with the Right by addressing problems of working class in the country and of the income disparity on the global scale. There should be no more immigration, and this task calls to stop the main creator of immigration, the unfair Judeo-American globalisation and Bush and Blair' s War against Islam.>> So we should become nationalists? I don't think the solution is more nationalism but more internationalism. That's what the left should be about. Opening borders, not closing them. "Jewish agenda?" "Judeo-American globalisation?" Nigga please... =========== Isn't Le Pen anti-Muslim? (english) ??? 4:57am Wed Apr 24 '02 comment#175685 Le Pen has said plenty of anti-Jewish things in the past but he is also vehemently anti-immigrant and specifically anti-Muslim. He blames the increase in crime on Algerian and other Muslim immigrants for example. I've agreed with some of the stuff Shamir has written in the past but this article is muddled and distrubing: >>Instead of supporting Jewish agenda, the Left should compete with the Right by addressing problems of working class in the country and of the income disparity on the global scale. There should be no more immigration, and this task calls to stop the main creator of immigration, the unfair Judeo-American globalisation and Bush and Blair' s War against Islam.>> So we should become nationalists? I don't think the solution is more nationalism but more internationalism. That's what the left should be about. Opening borders, not closing them. "Jewish agenda?" "Judeo-American globalisation?" Nigga please... ========= Le Pen is Anti-Muslim (english) Richard Martin 6:53am Wed Apr 24 '02 comment#175698 Le Pen is vehemently anti-muslim. He has documented cases of hiring (paying) skin heads to go and beat and/or kill them in the streets. Le Pen wants to eliminate all immigrants. His logic is like this: 300,000 unemployed in France 300,000 immigrants in France The immigrants are the reason for unemployment. Interesting huh? Sounds a lot like a fascist to the East from a few decades ago. ========== opening borders along vertical axes evrywhere (english) piet 8:05am Wed Apr 24 '02 this can be done whereever and becomes most effective there where mama's bones stick through her flesh due to human 'engineered' denudation. This is certainly needed on an international scale. Such code of conduct would certainly earn the passe partout in my book. No one should be barred from places where this is taught and practiced. the quest yon marker wrote: So we should become nationalists? I don't think the solution is more nationalism but more internationalism. That's what the left should be about. Opening borders, not closing them. ------------------------------- 173891 There was no massacre in Jenin (english) sean 9:43am Fri Apr 19 '02 (Modified on 12:52pm Fri Apr 19 '02) article#173891 Even the extremely left wing Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz states that there was no massacre in Jenin. If you trust the Palestinians then you are being duped! Ha'aretz: Friday, April 19, 2002 Iyyar 7, 5762 There was no massacre in Jenin The claim that there was a "massacre" in the Jenin refugee camp has been taken up by many news media around the world, human rights groups and even among many governments. This claim, originally made during the height of the fighting in the refugee camp, reverberates with gravity, seriously damaging Israel's political campaign to justify its self defense against terror and the legitimacy of the means it is using in that campaign. In Israel, too, suspicions were raised that there was truth to the Palestinian claims. Many feared that Jenin would be added to the black list of massacres that have shocked the world. The IDF contributed to those fears when it issued a preliminary estimate of hundreds of dead in the camp (it turned out that several score were killed, with the exact number still unknown) and by blocking journalists from entering the camp to report what was happening inside. That was an invitation to another charge, also widely reported, of an alleged cover-up. In recent days, journalists - including Ha'aretz reporters - have visited the camp, gathering their own first-hand impressions and eyewitness testimony about the IDF's operations. Ha'aretz reporter Amira Hass spent several days in the camp, and her report appears in today's pages. There is evidence of intense combat, but, with appropriate caution, it can already be said what did not happen in the Jenin refugee camp. There was no massacre. No order from above was given, nor was a local initiative executed, to deliberately and systematically kill unarmed people. In Israel of 2002, there is practically no way to cover up atrocities. Testimony by commanders and fighters in Jenin, many of whom were civilians called up into reserves for the purpose of the operation, as well as testimony by those who observed the events through various means refute the claims of a massacre. The fighting was intense, as could be expected in built-up areas, and especially against the background of rapid Israeli successes in other areas, particularly the Nablus casbah. Armed Palestinians shot, blew up and mined houses and alleyways. The soldiers, who had difficulty progressing, used bulldozers and suffered heavy losses - 23 soldiers were killed. Under such circumstances, civilians were also harmed. That is a terrible, sorrowful fact, resulting from the nature of the fighting, and in some specific cases there should be an examination to determine whether everything necessary was done to prevent civilian casualties. But declaring the fighting in Jenin a "massacre" is a mistake on the part of the naive, and a slander by others. Palestinian propagandists have made perverse use of legends that, in part, were invented outside Jenin. Leading these propagandists were officials of the Palestinian Authority who issued baseless charges of "executions," fanning the flames of hatred against Israel. The readiness of international elements, including the heads of the European Union, to accept the Palestinian version without question, is testimony to their character, to Israel's fragile situation and to Ariel Sharon's negative image. ------- snip --------- The UN is tied to the WTO (english) fact-checker 11:27am Fri Apr 19 '02 comment#173971 This is for all you morons that think the U.N. is independent from the WTO. What is the International Trade Centre UNCTAD/WTO (ITC)? http://www.intracen.org/ The International Trade Centre UNCTAD/WTO (ITC) is the focal point in the United Nations system for technical cooperation with developing countries in trade promotion. ITC was created by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1964 and since 1968 has been operated jointly by GATT (now by the World Trade Organization, or WTO) and the UN, the latter acting through the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). As an executing agency of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), ITC is directly responsible for implementing UNDP-financed projects in developing countries and economies in transition related to trade promotion. The UN HAS NO CREDIBILITY WHATSOEVER. ------------- Splitting hairs over language (english) Wallace 11:38am Fri Apr 19 '02 comment#173977 Above we have some controversy over words, specifically, the words "anti-semite" and "massacre". As mike points out, Arabs are considered semites. Appeantly the word goes back to something about the stem of Abraham, which then includes both Issac and Ishmael which then includes both the Jews and the Arabs. When someone says the word "anti-semetic", though, everyone knows they mean "anti-Jewish". Just an oddidity of the english language I suppose. So while mike may not technically be an "anti-semite", he sounds "anti-Jewish", which translates to "anti-semite" for the vast majority of the population. Correcting people everytime they use an incorrect word to label hate seems like an exhausting job, so I'll probably continue with my lazy use of "anti-semite". Which leads to another interesting word: "occupation". I use the word quite a bit. When discussing the mid-east, referring to the "occupied lands" means the territory Israel captured in the '67 war, excluding the Golan heights and the Siani. Of course, even pre-'67 Israel would be considered "occupied" for many, so again, the word falls short. I've tried "disputed" and "post-'67 lands" and even the long winded "Gaza and the West Bank", but people react best to the word "occupied", so again, popularity gives way to historical accuracy. The word of the day really is "massacre" though. I'm guessing it could mean two things in the case of Jenin. Either it involves a military battle in which a significant number of civilians were killed, or it means a battle in which civilians were directly targeted. When people declare or deny a "massacre", I have no idea which they mean. I've also used "massacre" to describe military battles. For example, "the Canadian landings at Dieppe were a massacre". If this is the bar, it looks like Jenin was no doubt a massacre. As for the first two, I'm not sure yet. Other interesting mid-east words: "moderate", "terrorism", "buffer zone", "right of return" Well that my useless thought for the day. --------------- Sean, keep going (english) lol 11:49am Fri Apr 19 '02 comment#173981 No that's not what I mean. Why attack an organization when you could be slandering entire races of humans just because of where they were born. O.K. Let's take it from " All Europeans are spineless" Ready...go --------------- sean you diabolic blindered man, tsk , tsk, t (english) piet 12:46pm Fri Apr 19 '02 comment#174041 Dutch media tidbits: Bush raising in (N)euro esteem, lowering in that of USies Baffling? I'd say! I was so flabbergasted and unbeleafy I forgot to read the (little) article 260 antisemitic 'actions' in france this month already. If I wanted to polarize, I'd reply to sean that there never were any suicide atrocities this month either. Pure pro pig ender pal. probusharonites say there were less anyway but an arab ecologist (yes the very sorta person who's existence I doubted in a recent comment, seems to teach at an israeli uni of all places) has a much more realistic take on the matter: this pruning will only encourage growth. Unity through opposition; good sparring practice; who says the jews lack the confidence of conceit. Hauptsache: die Wueste waechst, obwohl darin weniger waechst, spaerlicher, verhaltener, tischlein deck dich fischlein bedeck dich denn du wirst unbeschreiblich weiblich. oh by the way, bout the UN (english) piet 12:52pm Fri Apr 19 '02 comment#174047 check the link within item 173375 for a much longer list than yours seanyson sinsan and may you burn to a crisp in the sunsoon if you love the handiwork of your favorite semites man! --------------------------