| 181535 on israel's (s)election methods by Tim Wise ------------- 181059 Zionism, as its been practiced for the past 54 years, especially since 1967, reflects and re-enforces, in word and in deed, our arrogant, imperialist civilization. by Chief Bromden A favorite rererepost ------------------ The Israeli Jewish Settlements Making The Desert Bloom - With Destruction ------------- 181535 Understanding The Israeli Palestinian Conflict For The Average American (english) Tim Wise 1:14am Tue May 21 '02 article#181535 Israel bars any candidate from holding office who thinks Israel should be a secular, democratic state with equal rights for all. ** PLEASE CIRCULATE ** Defining Democracy By Tim Wise Webster's New World Dictionary defines democracy as, among other things, "the principle of equality of rights, opportunity and treatment, or the practice of this principle." Keep this in mind, as we'll be coming back to it shortly. Now, imagine that the United States were to abolish our Constitution, or perhaps had never had one to begin with. No Bill of Rights. No guarantees of things like free speech, freedom of assembly and due process of law. And imagine that Congress were to pass a law stating that the U.S. was from this point forward to be legally defined as a Christian nation. As such, Christians would be given special privileges for jobs, loans, and land ownership. Furthermore, political candidates espousing certain beliefs--especially those who might argue that we should be a nation with equal rights for all, and not a "Christian nation"--were no longer allowed to hold office. And imagine that next month, new laws were passed that restricted certain ethnic and religious groups from acquiring land in particular parts of the country, and made it impossible for members of ethnic minorities to hold certain jobs, or live in particular communities. And imagine that in response to perceived threats to our nation's internal security, new laws sailed through the House and Senate, providing for torture of those detained for suspected subversion. This, on top of still other laws providing for the detention of such suspects for long periods of time without trial or even a formal charge against them. In such a scenario, would anyone with an appreciation of the English language, and with the above definition in mind, dare suggest that we would be justified in calling ourselves a democracy? Of course not: and yet the term is repeatedly used to describe Israel--as in "the only democracy in the Middle East." This, despite the fact that said nation has no constitution. This, despite the fact that said nation is defined as the state of the Jewish people, providing special rights and privileges to anyone in the world who is Jewish and seeks to live there, over and above longtime Arab residents. This, despite the fact that said nation bars any candidate from holding office who thinks Israel should be a secular, democratic state with equal rights for all. This, despite the fact that non-Jews are restricted in terms of how much land they can own, and in which places they can own land at all. This, despite that fact that even the Israeli Supreme Court has acknowledged the use of torture against suspected "terrorists" and other "enemies" of the Jewish state. For some, it is apparently sufficient that Israel has an electoral system, and that Arabs have the right to vote in those elections (though just how equally this right is protected is of course a different matter). The fact that one can't vote for a candidate who questions the special Jewish nature of the state, because such candidates can't run for or hold office, strikes most as irrelevant: hardly enough to call into question their democratic credentials. But of course, the Soviet Union also had elections, of a sort. And in those elections, most people could vote, though candidates who espoused an end to the communist system were barred from participation. Voters got to choose between communists. In Israel, voters get to choose between Zionists. In the former case, we recognize such truncated freedom as authoritarianism. In the latter case, we call it democracy. If it was not already obvious that the English language was dead--what with the inanities introduced to it by the business-speak of corporate capitalism, such as "thinking outside the box," "managing one's human assets," and "planned shrinkage"--this should pretty well prove the point. If what we see in Israel is indeed democracy, then what does fascism look like? I'm sorry, but I am over it. As a Jew--hear me now--I am over it. And if my language seems too harsh here, that's tough. Because it's nothing compared to the sickening things said by Israeli leaders throughout the years. Like Menachem Begin, former Prime Minister who told the Knesset in 1982 that the Palestinians were "beasts walking on two legs." Or former P.M. Ehud Barak, who offered a more precise form of dehumanization when he referred to the Palestinians as "crocodiles." And speaking of Barak, for more confirmation on the death of language, one should examine his April 14 op-ed in the New York Times. Therein, Barak insisted that democracy in Israel could be "maintained" (ahem), so long as the Jewish state was willing to set up security fences to separate itself from the Palestinians, and keep the Palestinians in their place. Calling the process "unilateral disengagement," Barak opined that limiting access by Arabs to Israel is the key to maintaining a Jewish majority, and thus the Jewish nature of the state. That the Jewish nature of the state is inimical to democracy as defined by every dictionary in the world matters not, one supposes. Barak even went so far as to warn that in the absence of such security fences, Israel might actually become an apartheid state. Imagine that: unless they institute separation they might become an apartheid state. The irony of such a statement is nearly perfect, and once again signals that words no longer have meaning. They are but the sounds that emanate from one's throat and are accompanied by breath and occasionally spittle. They mean nothing. Define them as you choose. Interestingly, amidst the subterfuge, other elements of Barak's essay struck me as surprisingly honest: much more honest, in fact, than when he had been Prime Minister and supposedly made that "generous offer" to Arafat about which we keep hearing. You know, the one that would have allowed the maintenance of most Jewish settlements in the territories, and would have restricted the Palestinian state to the worst land, devoid of its own water supply, and cutoff at numerous chokepoints by Israeli security. Yeah that one. The one that has been described variously (without any acknowledgement of the inconsistency) as having offered the Palestinians either 93%, or is it 95%, or maybe 96%, or perhaps 98% of the West Bank and Gaza. Well, in the Times piece, Barak finally came clean, admitting that Israel would need to erect the fences in such a manner as to incorporate at least one-quarter of the territories into Israel, so as to subsume the settlements. So not 93 percent, or 96%, or 98%, but at best 75%, and still on the worst land. Furthermore, the fences would slice up Jerusalem and restrict Arab access to the Holy Basin and the Old City: a direct swipe at Muslims who seek access on a par with their fellow descendants of Abraham. That this was Barak's idea all along should surprise no one. And that such a "solution" would mean the final loss for the Palestinians of all but 17% of their pre-Israel territory will likely not strike many in the U.S. media or political elite as being terribly unfair. If anything, we will continue to hear about the intransigence of the Arabs, and their unwillingness to accept these "generous offers," which can only be seen as generous to a people who have become so inured to human suffering that their very souls are in jeopardy. Or to those who have never consulted a dictionary. For once again, it defines generous as: "willing to give or share; unselfish; large; ample; rich in yield; fertile." In a world such as this, where words have lost all meaning, we might as well just burn all the dictionaries. Sometimes, the linguistic obfuscation goes beyond single words, and begins to encompass entire phrases. One such example is the oft-repeated statement to the effect that "Jews should be able to live anywhere in the world, and to say otherwise is to endorse anti-Semitism." Thus, it is asked, why shou't Jews be able to settle in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem? Of course, whoever says such a thing must know of its absurdity beforehand. After all, the right to live wherever one chooses has never included the right to live in someone el's house, after taking it by force or fraud. Nor does it include the right to set up house in territories that are conquered and occupied as the result of military conflict: indeed, international law expressly forbids such a thing. And furthermore, those who insist on the right of Jews to live wherever they choose, by definition deny the same right to Palestinians, who cannot live in the place of their choosing, or even in the homes that were once theirs. Needless to say, many Palestinians would like to live inside I's pre-1948 borders, and exercise a right of return in order to do so. But don't expect those who demand the right for Jews to plant stakes anywhere we choose to offer the same right to Arabs. Many of these are among the voices that insist Jordan is "the Palestinian state," and thus, Palestinians should be perfectly happy living there. Since Palestinians are Semites, one could properly call such an attitude "anti-Semitic"--seeing as how it limits the rights of Semitic peoples to live wherever they wish--but given the transmogrification of the term "anti-Semitism" into something that can only apply to Jew-hatred, such a usage would seem bizarre to many, one suspects. The rhetorical shenanigans even extend to the world of statistics. Witness the full-page advertisement in the New York Times placed by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, which ran the same day as the Barak op-ed. Therein, these supposed spokespersons for American Judaism stated their unyielding support for Israel, and claimed that the 450 Israeli deaths caused by terrorism since the beginning of the second intifada, were equal to 21,000 deaths in the U.S. from terrorism, as a comparable percentage of each nation's overall population. Playing upon fears and outrage over the attacks of 9/11, the intent was quite transparent: get U.S. readers to envision 9/11 all over again, only with seven times more casualties! A brilliant move, indeed. But of course, honesty--an intellectual commodity in short supply these days, and altogether missing from the rhetorical shelves of the Conference of Presidents--would require one to point out that the numbers of Palestinian non-combatant (that is to say civilian) deaths, at the hands of Israel in that same time period, is much higher, and indeed would be "equal to" far more than 21,000 in the U.S., as a comparable share of respective populations. To be honest to a fault would be to note that the 900 or so Palestinians slaughtered with Israeli support in the Sabra and Shatilla camps during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, would be equal to over 40,000 Americans. Even more, the 17,500 Arabs killed overall by Israel during that invasion would be roughly equivalent to over 800,000 Americans today: the size of many large cities. In the dictionary such a thing might fall under the heading of terrorism. But remember, words no longer have any meaning. Sounding eerily like Adolph Hitler, Ariel Sharon once said, "a lie should be tried in a place where it will attract the attention of the world." And so it has been: throughout the media and the U.S. political scene, on CNN in the personage of Benjamin Netanyahu, and in the pages of the New York Times. And in my Hebrew School, where we were taught that Jews were to be "a light unto the nations," instead of this dim bulb, this flickering nightlight, this barely visible spark, whose radiance is only sufficient to make visible the death-rattle of the more noble aspects of the Jewish tradition. Unless we who are Jews insist on a return to honest language, and an end to the hijacking of our culture and faith by madmen, racists and liars, I fear that the light may be extinguished forever. ------====------ http://warnow.blogspot.com/ LECHA DODI - TIME TO SIGN OFF Well, it's the Sabbath Day once again, time for me to quit the Internet and stop blogging for 24 hours. As always, here's something substantial and religious to sustain you until I return. It's a drash I gave one Rosh Hashanah. Shabbat shalom! *** Rosh Hashanah is a time for new beginnings. A time to take stock and look to the future. Often we find ourselves emphasising our past. It’s a glorious past, certainly. We are an old faith, one of the last living remnants of the ancient world. The Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Phonecians, the Romans – all dead. But not us. Should we take pride in our survival? It certainly beats extinction. But survival seems to have become a mantra in the modern Jewish world. There are endless commissions, committees, surveys and reports all with the goal of enhancing Jewish survival. But I sometimes feel we’ve got things backwards. All this talk about how to ensure our survival, the methodology to be employed, how many trips to Israel our children need, how many hours a week of Hebrew language and Jewish studies they require in order to guarantee they won’t marry a non-Jew…it’s all a bit mechanical and depressing. And it doesn’t even work. The fact of the matter is that we live in a peaceful, free, open democratic society where we face little or no genuine threat. And there’s no point in trying to coerce people into staying Jewish. In this society we have complete freedom of choice. There’s simply no possibility of erecting higher and higher walls around us, to cut ourselves off from other people. And nor should we. Judaism is not a hermit religion – we are commanded to be in and of the world, to change it, and make it better. The mission of Israel, to bring about the messianic era for all the world, is not advanced if we crawl into a hole and pull it in after ourselves. If we constantly talk about using Judaism as a tool to ensure our survival – in other words if we make simply staying alive our ultimate goal and consider religion a useful mechanism to achieve that, we will in fact be dooming ourselves. The Torah is not a spade to dig with. We exist as long as we keep the faith. Am Yisrael exists to serve Judaism, not the other way around. Once you have the why, the how pretty much takes care of itself. Without the why, no amount of how will help us, and we will die. Which brings me to the subject of death. In the central story of Judaism, we fled Egypt and its cult of death. We fled its oppression, its dehumanisation and its idol worship. Egyptian society was centered on death. Life to them was merely a preparation for the afterlife. The Pharaohs raised massive pyramids to house their remains after death. But our purpose is centered on life and freedom and the infinite possibilities of existence. The story of the Exodus, our national origin myth, sees us breaking the unchanging cycle of time and showing that history could have a direction and a purpose, rather than endlessly repeat the patterns of the past. But is that they way we see our faith today? I believe that tragically, many of us have gone down the wrong path and adopted another, grimmer story. The events of the 20th century are still too close to us for a proper perspective perhaps, but it is clear that there is a kind of cult of the Holocaust that has sprung up. It acts as a sort of civil religion for many of us, a “master story” not unlike that of Exodus. But what does this story tell us? That Jews are fated to be persecuted, and our ultimate goal must be survival by whatever means necessary? Rabbi Michael Goldberg, in his book “Why Should Jews Survive: Looking past the Holocaust toward a Jewish future” says some Jews believe that because of the Holocaust, we can count neither on God nor on other, non-Jewish human beings to make Jewish existence safe in the world, a world that will never cease to be hostile to our existence. “So, in the final analysis, this belief leads to three inescapable conclusions: There is no God, humanity is incorrigible, and the world is irredeemable”. That is not Judaism, but its opposite. This is the danger, that by placing suffering and death at the heart of modern Jewish life we are sanctifying mere survival, instead of service to God, as the purpose of Jewish life. But this is illogical. That Jews will survive we need never doubt--unless we doubt that there is a God who makes and keeps promises. But if we doubt that, then why care about Jewish survival at all? In fact, these doubts amount to a form of atheism. The emphasis on the Holocaust and on physical survival instead of service to God alters Judaism's most fundamental precept and rewrites its central prayer, the Sh'ma, to read "you shall love survival with all your heart, with all your soul, and all your might." If we reject our covenant with God, with a higher purpose and meaning for our lives, then our survival is meaningless, a physical fact without transcendent importance for history or for God. Why did Lot’s wife turn into a pillar of salt? Because she was commanded not to look back at the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, but did so. She turned her face to the past, and was frozen with horror, unable to turn towards the future. There is a story that she cried so hard that the salt in her tears crystalised around her. In Judaism, we have laws relating to mourning, very good laws, designed to allow for stages of grieving. But they are also designed to gradually bring the mourner back into life again, into the life of the community. The shiva period, the shloshim, reciting Kaddish for a year and then the yartzheit each year on the anniversary of the death – these are ways in which we acknowledge our grief, without allowing it to overwhelm and destroy us. Children cannot be raised in a house of perpetual mourning. One cannot make a home in a cemetery. It is impossible to make our way to our future if we perpetually march on a road of bones. We cannot live if we place suffering and death at the center of our existence. The past is important. But the future is more so. And great and glorious as our past is, our future will be even better, if we can turn our faces towards it. Our task, the mission of Israel, is to bring about the redemption of the world. The entire world, not just ourselves. The world needs Jews. It needs creative, playful, dedicated, thoughtful, radical, conservative, skeptical, rational, pious, loving Jews, Jews of all kinds. Jews like us. What it doesn’t need is a Judaism that has been frozen into a pillar of salt. We have faced terrible things in the past. We will probably face them again in the future. But we have no reason to fear for our existence while we remain faithful to the covenant. Do you see this scroll in the Ark behind me? When we read “In this scroll is the secret of our people’s life from Sinai until now”, I believe that. No guns, no chains, no dungeons or secret police can prevail against the ideas it contains, provided we remain true to the covenant with God, in whatever way we choose to imagine that God – supreme being, ultimate reality, or meaning and purpose in life. A long time ago we were told that we had a choice between life and death, blessing and curse, and were urged to choose life. That choice remains for each of us to answer, in our own way. Choose life – and have no fear. posted by | 6:50 PM Comments [5] ---------------------------- THE AGE CATCHES THE FORTUYN BUG Poor old Pim - he's a real hit now he's dead and can't enjoy it (and you just know how hugely he'd love all this attention). This morning's Melbourne Age catches the zeitgeist nicely, with an op-ed piece by Pamela Bone that starts off a little gingerly, but eventually gets into the swing nicely. She can't work out if Islam is left-wing or right-wing (we really have to ditch that terminology, it's starting to get in the way), but eventually she decides that there are aspects of it she just plain doesn't like, and says so. Which is something of a breakthrough, given the self-imposed shackles of political correctness in most of the media. It's as if any publically expressed unease with any aspect of an ethnic group's existence automatically turns you into a genocidal lunatic. I'm not up for gratuitous ethnic smears - I support a multi-ethnic community as a worthwhile ideal. Nor do I fancy assimilation. Completely replacing your religious or ethnic identity with another is impossible and immoral. Acculturation, however, is just fine and dandy and probably neccessary. I suspect that where Europe is turning right it is doing so in large part because it is trying to preserve its hard-won left values. It is not right wing to deplore religious fundamentalism, to worry that one's daughters or granddaughters may one day live under a regime like the Taliban, to fear the mindset of suicide bombers. "Christianity and Judaism have gone through the laundromat of humanism and enlightenment, but that isn't the case with Islam," Fortuyn wrote. More than one eminent essayist has made the similar point that Islam needs to go through its own "reformation". Some brave Muslim scholars have said there needs to be a reinterpretation of some passages in the Koran, as have Muslim feminists. Some have had orders sentencing them to death imposed as a result. Good to get that off your chest Pamela? It gets easier with practise. Stand by for the "racist... neo-fascist...inappropriate... un-Australian" letters. When they appear, I'll put excerpts up here, especially if any of them use actual arguments rather than name-calling. Pamela Bone has also written a good piece about left-wing anti-semitism, called "It might be an ugly war, but a Palestinian holocaust it is not" which is also worth reading. ====>>>>> It might be an ugly war, but a Palestinian holocaust it is not By Pamela Bone April 23 2002 Have the Palestinians the moral right to say Hitler was right about the Jews?" an e-mail correspondent asked last week. He was not, I think, asking me to answer this question. It was in an "open letter" to John Howard and Alexander Downer, sent on to me from one Marian Kaluski, who says he (or she) is chairman of an organisation called "Australians Against the Israeli Occupation of Palestine". Even if the letter, castigating the Australian Government for its alleged one-sided support of Israel, did not contain lines referring to "the sickness in the Jewish soul", or asserting that "the vast majority of the Jews have always been enemies of non-Jews and Christianity", the words in the subject line would have given it away: "letter to a Jewboy". So now there is an excuse to hate the Jews again. Of course it is possible to criticise the response of the Israeli Government to Palestinian suicide bomb attacks without being anti-semitic. Indeed, some of the harshest critics of the Israeli policies are Jewish. Kaluski quotes them approvingly, as if to lend credibility to his argument, which, summed up, is that there is no difference between the Nazis' treatment of the Jews and the Israelis' treatment of the Palestinians. Is it really necessary to point out that there is a difference? I fear that it is, because this claim is being heard more and more. The Nazi holocaust was as clear an example of genocide as history has known, perhaps paralleled only by the 1994 genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda. In both cases an attempt was made to wipe a people from the face of the earth. However pitiful the plight of the Palestinians, however reprehensible the way the assault on the Jenin refugee camp was conducted, however wrong the occupation, and however disastrous the election of Ariel Sharon has proved for Israelis and Palestinians, no Israeli government has ever intended to wipe out the Palestinian people. The rise in anti-Jewish feeling around the world is scary, not only for Jews but for anyone with a memory. It is not unexpected in some Arab countries, where dislike of Jews has long been close to the mainstream, and where people do feel great solidarity with the Palestinians. In one Egyptian newspaper, Hitler was recently referred to as "Hitler of blessed memory". In a survey of Islamic countries, 62 per cent of respondents believed Jews carried out the September 11 attacks on America. But across Europe, too, the attacks on Jewish schools, synagogues and shops are the worst since World War II. There have been similar attacks, though to a lesser extent, in Australia. Yet even here the muttering is growing louder. Some is based on the traditional sympathy, especially on the left, for the underdogs, who are undoubtedly in this conflict the Palestinians (though I don't know how confident and superior Israelis can be feeling at the moment, knowing their children might be blown up on the school bus any day of the week). But at least some of the solidarity expressed towards Palestinians is based more on the premise that "my enemy's enemy is my friend" than any real concern for the plight of the Palestinians. So-called peace marches are not about peace at all but about expressing anger towards Israel - and often, by extension, towards Jews. And yes, the media - particularly the electronic media, which has less ability to analyse - does seem at times, to me, to have an anti-Israel bias. Israel's incursions into Palestinian territory are invariably "Israel's bloody incursions". How bloody is a restaurant in which dozens of young people have been killed by a suicide bomber? How does Israel (or indeed the rest of the world, given the propensity of suicide to be imitated) protect itself from people who believe that to kill oneself and as many others as possible is good and glorious? When I wrote on this page recently that Muslim women should not be teaching in Australian taxpayer-supported schools with their faces hidden behind a veil - an opinion I still hold - it was Jewish women who castigated me and upheld their right to do so. It is Jews who are disproportionately represented in anti-racism organisations, in human rights bodies, in philanthropy. It is my Jewish friends who remind me that there is a lot of racism in Israel too; that there are many Palestinians and Israelis striving to work together for peace; that the situation in Israel is extremely complex; that it is largely about competing victimhoods; and that any movement, including support for Palestinians, is likely to draw in some strange bedfellows. Jews can perhaps take comfort that at least part of the criticism of Israel is due to double standards. The world seems to have higher moral expectations of the Israelis, just as it had higher expectations of white South Africans during apartheid. But this is merely another form of racism. And there are terrible lessons from history to show where it can lead. Pamela Bone is an associate editor of The Age. E-mail: pbone@theage.com.au ---------------- | - conservative Christian
anarchism From: "Kermit Snelson" Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2002 12:32:03 -0800
In-reply-to: <200203181607.LAA30598 @bbs.thing.net> Reply-to: nettime-bold@nettime.org
John Armitage: > Isn't it about time we all stopped playing along with
this > silly game? For the record, PETER LAMBORN WILSON IS HAKIM > BEY
-- the 'Prince of Liteness'. ---------------- Yes, but the great American
historian Henry Adams demonstrated back in 1907 that any true doctrine
of "spiritual anarchism" like PLW's revolutionary Sufism requires exactly
two personas. Adams himself was one of two members of "the wholly new and
original party of Conservative Christian Anarchists," whose mission was
"to restore true poetry under the inspiration of the "Götterdämmerung."
[1] Here is his explanation of the "two persona" principle of spiritual
anarchism and how it relates to the underlying critical/dialectical method
of "the will to be-against": This wing of the anarchistic party consisted
rigorously of but two members, Adams and Bay [Bey? - KS] Lodge. The conservative
Christian anarchist, as a party, drew life from Hegel and Schopenhauer
rightly understood. By the necessity of their philosophical descent, each
member of the fraternity denounced the other as unequal to his lofty task
and inadequate to grasp it. Of course, no third member could be so much
as considered, since the great principle of contradiction could be expressed
only by opposites; and no agreement could be conceived, because anarchy,
by definition, must be chaos and collision, as in the kinetic theory of
a perfect gas. Doubtless this law of contradiction was itself agreement,
a restriction of personal liberty inconsistent with freedom; but the "larger
synthesis" admitted a limited agreement provided it were strictly confined
to the end of larger contradiction. Thus the great end of all philosophy--the
"larger synthesis" was attained, but the process was arduous, and while
Adams, as the older member, assumed to declare the principle, Bay Lodge
necessarily denied both the assumption and the principle in order to assure
its truth. [2] Having shown the dialectical necessity of both the "two
persona" principle and the "will to be-against" in spiritual anarchism,
Adams goes on in the next paragraph to anticipate Negri's exhortation to
"push through Empire to come out the other side": Adams proclaimed that
in the last synthesis, order and anarchy were one, but that the unity was
chaos. As anarchist, conservative and Christian, he had no motive or duty
but to attain the end; and, to hasten it, he was bound to accelerate progress;
to concentrate energy; to accumulate power; to multiply and intensify forces;
to reduce friction, increase velocity and magnify momentum, partly because
this was the mechanical law of the universe as science explained it; but
partly also in order to get done with the present which artists and some
others complained of... [3] Toward those who objected to this doctrine,
Adams directed this thundering retort: Of course the untaught critic instantly
objected that this scheme was neither conservative, Christian, nor anarchic,
but such objection meant only that the critic should begin his education
in any infant school in order to learn that anarchy which should be logical
would cease to be anarchic. To the conservative Christian anarchist, the
amiable doctrines of Kropotkin were sentimental ideas of Russian mental
inertia covered with the name of anarchy merely to disguise their innocence;
and the outpourings of Elisée Reclus were ideals of the French _ouvrier_,
diluted with absinthe, resulting in a bourgeois dream of order and inertia.
Neither made a presence of anarchy except as a momentary stage towards
order and unity. Neither of them had formed any other conception of the
universe than what they had inherited from the priestly class to which
their minds obviously belonged. With them, as with the socialist, communist,
or collectivist, the mind that followed nature had no relation; if anarchists
needed order, they must go back to the twelfth century where their thought
had enjoyed its thousand years of reign. The conservative Christian anarchist
could have no associate, no object, no faith except the nature of nature
itself; and his "larger synthesis" had only the fault of being so supremely
true that even the highest obligation of duty could scarcely oblige Bay
Lodge to deny it in order to prove it. Only the self-evident truth that
no philosophy of order-- except the Church--had ever satisfied the philosopher
reconciled the conservative Christian anarchist to prove his own. [4] It
may interest some to know that Henry Adams, the author of these lines,
was respectively the grandson and great-grandson of the sixth and second
Presidents of the United States. Kermit Snelson Notes: [1] Adams, Henry,
_The Education of Henry Adams_, 1907, p. 405 http://xroads.virginia.edu/
~HYPER/hadams/eha27.html ---------------------
181059 First and foremost, Zionism serves as an instrument for butressing the immoral idea that Western European civilization has a God-given right to continue to disposess, maim and kill the niggers of Asia, the niggers of Eastern Europe, the niggers of Africa and the nigers of Latin America and the Caribbean. Created by Britain and sustained by the United States during its 35 occupation of Gaza, the Golan Heights and the West Bank, there can be no doubt that Isreal is a full-fledged Western European civilizaiton. In fact, U.S. support for Israel is so great that it basically is a U.S. state in all but name only. Comparisons between the official histories of the colonization of the United States and Israeli colonization of Arab lands are just. Until very recently the official history of the colonization of the United States by European settlers was devoid of the millions of Indians either killed or rounded up into concentration camps, euphemistically called "reservations." American settlers found a land empty of people and turned it into the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, we told ourselves for the first 200 years of our history. This mythology parallels the Zionist mythology about Palestine being devoid of human inhabitants, with the Zionist settlers turning it into a desert paradise. Like the American Indians a century before them, the Arabs of Palestine in 1948 were the designated historical niggers expelled from their acestoral lands. The one difference between the United States is Israel's puny size, only about 8,000 square miles encompasses the lands of Israel proper and Greater Israel: Gaza, the Golan Heights and the West Bank. There just isn't enough land to create the concetration camps the United States created for the American Indians. The Israeli government wants to expell the Arabs from Gaza and the West Bank entirely. The current prime minister of Israel, the murderous war criminal Ariel Sharon, is on record more than once for his support for expelling all the Palestinians from the Occupied Territories. Sharon may not live to see a day when the Occupied Territories are Arab-free, but the odds are in favor of the Palestinians getting driven off what little land they have left. Either by the continuing brutal occupation, which sees them getting pushed into smaller and smaller enclaves and deprived a basic resources, especially water, or by an all out offensive aimed at driving them out of the West Bank and Gaza, much like the August 1995 Croatian offensive that drove all the Serbs out of Krajinia. The beauty of the colonization project for the overwhelmingly European Zionists in charge of it was that it was conducted under the convienent guise of righting an historic attrocity, the mass murder of most of European Jewry during World War II. Of course, expelling Arabs from their lands in Palestine never added one day to the life of the 5,000,000 - 6,000,000 Jews who died in Europe during World War II. Nevertheless, the Zionists have been able to get away with smearing any critics of Israel with the invective of "anti-semitism" for the past 54 years. Nevermind that Arabs are a semetic people also, and that American society doesn't seem to think that expelling them from their land constitutes an act of "anti-semetism." This form of Jewish chauvinism is similar to the way U.S. citizens selfishly call themselves, and only themselves, "Americans." Of course, any criticisms of U.S. foreign policy is instantly smeared as "anti-American." As long as most people in the United States cower away from justly criticising Israel's racist policies towards the Arabs living under its military occupation for fear of being branded as "anti-semetic," then Israel will continue to be the most heavily aided of all U.S. allies. Israel will also continue to serve as a bulwark in defense of U.S. privelege in the world today. The Israelis are example to the U.S. of how you treat a Third World people: You kick them in the face and beat the shit out of them with great zeal. For this, Israel is, and always will be, greatly admired by most U.S. intellectuals. ================= HOW MANY DAMN TIMES? (english) J 8:50pm Sat May 18 '02 comment#181104 How many damn times r u fucking racist palestinian gangs w/ presidents, suicide bomby dudes gonna re-post this hate on indymedia??? -------------------------- 181141 The Israeli Jewish Settlements Making The Desert Bloom - With Destruction (english) InDepthNews 2:13am Sun May 19 '02 InDepthNews@hotmail.com article#181141 In March, during the worst of the fighting on the West Bank, a delegation from the International Parliament of Writers visited Israel and Palestine. Among the party was Christian Salmon from France. People were fond of saying in the 1960s that [Israel] tried to make the desert bloom Since then the biblical garden has become a desert, a wasteland, a battlefield.” Full Le Monde Diplomatique article May 2002 PALESTINE FROM NEAR AND FAR The bulldozer war In Palestine the violence has targeted the entire landscape. A trail of devastation stretches as far as the eye can see: a jumble of demolished buildings, levelled hillsides and flattened forests. This barrage of concentrated damage has been wrought not only by the bombs and tanks of traditional warfare, but by industrious, vigorous destruction that has toppled properties like a violent tax assessor. by CHRISTIAN SALMON * A concrete-and-asphalt ugliness now mars some of the most beautiful views in the world. Hillsides have been carved up for bypass roads to Israeli settlements. On either side of the road Palestinian homes have been destroyed, olive trees uprooted and orange orchards razed, on behalf of enhanced visibility. All that remains is a no-man's land topped by watchtowers. In the hostilities, the omnipresent bulldozers have as much strategic importance as the tanks. Never before has such an innocuous piece of equipment augured such violence and brutality The twin mind-sets of construction and destruction have long coexisted here. In the 1950s thousands of pine trees, not olives, not oranges, were planted to wipe out traces of destroyed Palestinian villages; agricultural development was then hailed as a hallmark of civilisation. But today, in thrall to the forces of destruction, the gardener's hand has turned against the land, slashing and plundering, uprooting, displacing and depopulating No concerted effort is being made to create a Palestinian state, a binational entity or even two separate Israeli and Palestinian states. Instead the forces at work here seek geographic fragmentation and dissolution, the abolition of the land itself Official speeches and UN resolutions often fail to mention an important thing: this soil contains the interwoven strands of thousands of years of human history, the strata of numerous cultures and civilisations. The countryside and the roads, the fields and the olive groves are the endangered legacy of all humankind Destruction During the week we spent in Ramallah, Gaza and Rafah, all we saw was destruction: villages, roads and homes, all demolished. Crops have been burned and public services bombarded. Missiles from helicopter gunships or F-16 fighter planes have destroyed newly completed civilian infrastructure. The European Commission has compiled an extraordinary list of the EU-funded projects that have been damaged. These include Gaza international airport, Gaza seaport, Ramallah's Voice of Palestine radio station, Bethlehem's Intercontinental Hotel and a forensic laboratory. Municipal infrastructure including schools, public housing projects, roads, sewers and recycling centres have been destroyed, together with the administrative offices of a peace project in Jenin, reforestation projects in Beit Lahia, the central statistics office in Ramallah and irrigation systems in Jericho. In total 17 projects valued at $15.58m. Does anyone believe that all these sites were terrorist hideouts? We visited a razed village near Rafah on the Egyptian border and walked among the rubble of bulldozed homes. Exercise books, kitchen utensils and a toothbrush were strewn about, signs of life reduced to pieces. One woman told us that residents were given five minutes to leave their homes in the middle of the night. The bulldozers returned several times to "finish the job"; these three words may well become the Israeli army's catchphrase. Mounted high atop the watchtowers, infrared machine guns watch over the wasteland. There are no soldiers about. At night the guns fire automatically as soon as any lights are turned on. The first few rows of houses are riddled with bullet holes and their residents face the constant threat of automatic weapons fire. This must be how buffer zones are created. The War Machine Like some stinging insect bent on inflicting injury, the war machine is in perpetual motion, spreading boundaries wherever it goes, patiently and absent-mindedly. Here the border is an all-pervasive force, cutting through street corners, hillsides, villages, even houses. Military fortifications have replaced the olive groves. City walls are all reinforced, each one a hostile presence. Any private home might conceal a lurking sniper. Checkpoints loom up at every bend in the road, sometimes every 100m; there are over 700 in the West Bank alone. Because some roads are blocked off, travelling to Bir Zeit University means you have to take a bus and a taxi as well as walking part of the way. The occupied territories have become a grid of impenetrable cells, with the Israeli army controlling all access in and out. There are some 220 of these rat traps perhaps reservations or ghettos might be a better term with battalions of Merkava tanks and Apache helicopters (supplied by the US military) on constant patrol. Light and Darkness This is a new type of frontier: portable, porous and hazy, a border in motion. One evening we climbed with Mahmoud Darwish, the poet, to the top of a small hill in Ramallah, where we looked out on the twinkling lights of Jerusalem only a few kilometres away. In the foreground lay areas in shadow, with only a few scattered lights from Palestinian homes. To our right off in the distance, there was a zone of bright light with a deserted illuminated roadway leading to an Israeli settlement. And amid this shimmering nightscape, I could pick out the border. The Israeli occupation comes down to this: the right to determine what will be illuminated and what will be cast into darkness, what will be rendered visible or invisible, accessible or inaccessible. The border governs every aspect, even the division of light and shadow, like some supernatural apparition... Fortress Mentality There are windows with narrow openings to accommodate guns, wall after wall of high façades, row upon row of buildings: this is the city-as-barracks. The Israeli settlements present a series of closed-off architectural forms that embody the feeling of self-confinement. No doubt this is due to security constraints but it also reveals an obsession with space, a conception of space based on fear and repression. "The truth of an era", said the Austrian writer, Hermann Broch, about late 19th century Vienna, "may generally be read in its architectural façades". If Broch's conclusion is correct, the building façades in the Israeli settlements are slogans that betray a sense of environmental panic, a fear of the outside world, the antithesis of hospitality-of-place Unethical, Illegal, Impracticable and Extravagant The political debates and media coverage have failed to address an important issue: Israel's colonisation of the occupied territories is not only unethical and illegal, it is impracticable. Indeed it is founded on a sense of unbearable living that is peculiar to the pathologies of exile and also afflicts those living in refugee camps. Strictly speaking, the Israeli settlements are uninhabitable places, not just uncomfortable, dangerous or impractical over the long term. The settlements show the impossible side of habitation that goes hand in hand with the question of return. They are an anti-urban development, based on warfare, as we might speak of a war-based economy. This is civil development founded on incivility. Hence the paradoxes. The settlements are extravagant ensuring security within areas having a Palestinian majority there are 5,000 settlers versus 1.5m Palestinians in the Gaza Strip requires constant vigilance and complete control over traffic entering and leaving the areas. An Israeli settler driving by creates traffic jams on the side roads, which are blocked off by checkpoints. This roadside version of apartheid obliges the inventive civilian population to come up with ever-greater feats of nerve “Never have so many people been confined to such a small area” Traffic between Israel and the occupied territories has been totally blocked off, with large numbers of Palestinians complaining of house arrest. Meeting with other people is impossible because of the traffic restrictions, which also make travel between Ramallah and Gaza impossible. Even a trip within the Gaza Strip can take longer than the flight from Tel Aviv to New York. In the occupied territories Israel is occupying time as well as space, with people facing long lines at checkpoints before being allowed to return home... The key question is not the one posed by Kafka "What must we do in order to live?" since the goal here is not living, but dislodging and destruction. This is the first war to be waged with bulldozers. This is an attempt at deterritorialisation without historical precedent. This is total warfare that targets the civilian population and the land . This is war in an age of agoraphobia, a fear of open spaces, seeking not the division of territory but its abolition. * Author of Tombeau de la fiction, Denoël, Paris, 1999 and Censure! Censure!, Stock, Paris, 2000. He is also the founder and executive director of the International Writers' Parliament, for which he edits the journal Autodafé Translated by Luke Sandford ----------------------------- 180795 Break the Window of Opportunity (english) Joshua A. Norton 12:21pm Fri May 17 '02 phone: 212-696-6615 info@theglitch.org article#180795 If a Presidential blowjob is call for a $50 million investigation,' then fucking over the 2000+ people who died on September 11th, along with the subsequent victims of The War on Terror' is certainly worth a few bucks more. If a Presidential blowjob is call for a $50 million investigation,' then fucking over the 2000+ people who died on September 11th, along with the subsequent victims of The War on Terror', is certainly worth a few bucks more. Will it be called for? Or are the American people still slavishly obedient to the Resident in Chief? For those willing to take a rational look at the evidence that has amassed since 9.11, it is clear that with one more push, that is, an honest and thorough investigation, we will see the most riotous scandal to hit this country since The Shot Heard 'Round The World. K Street will see a parade of heads rolling all the way home -- to Leavenworth, or worse. This admission of foreknowledge could have apocalyptic consequences for the Executive Branch, and, in turn, for the very structure of this deMOCKracy. The only thing that will convince the Great Herd to call for Great Change is if they lose all faith in their leaders. And it is up to us to corrode this Blind Faith. With this admission by Resident Bush, a new war is initiated -- a propaganda/counterpropaganda war that will fully determine the extent to which this matter is investigated -- or if it is even investigated at all. We at The Glitch are already in mid-campaign, as we've been calling for the dissemination of the CounterPropaganda posters posted on our website. We've received some great feedback indicating that others have joined in by either utilizing the posters we have created, or by creating their own CounterProp in a similar style (altering WW!! Propaganda posters), and disseminating them all about their respective towns. Now we will be shifting focus to create text/images which call for a full-scale investigation into who knew what & when, and will include work that puts pressure on the corporate media to NOT downplay the significance of the evidence that DESERVES investigation. As we stated at the start, if a blowjob can launch a $50 million, then being complicit in the murder of the citizens one has sworn to protect is worth at least that much more. We encourage everyone to demand to the press, to their representative,” to their friends, family, and their family pets, that this be investigated thoroughly, honestly, and with full disclosure. This War On Terrorâ„¢ is already unjust, just consider how much more unjust it would seem if it all could have been avoided but was let to happen for the almighty dollar. As most of you know, we CANNOT rely on Democrats to call and carry out this investigation honestly and thoroughly. They have bowed to the Resident at every turn, with the sole exception of Rep. Cynthia McKinney who has been calling for an investigation for months now, and who was admonished even by some of her fellow Democrats for so doing. We must speak louder than ever before. A window has been opened that cannot be allowed to close. We call upon organizing groups to organize, quickly, loudly, and veraciously. Anything will do: a mass march, or a Brisk Stroll. Anything. But more importantly, we call upon individuals to take action of their own, do not wait to be lead. If you manage to call for an action, let us know; we will produce flyers and corresponding information and have it wheat pasted all over town. And as mentioned, we are working on producing materials to be distributed, as well as a project or two not to be listed in a public forum (and that you’re not likely to hear about when complete as we do not publicize or take credit for these actions), and will submit updates regularly. To join our mailing list and receive updates, or for general comments/questions visit our webpage at http://theglitch.org or email us at info@theglitch.org ========= http://www.flonnet.com /f11908/119080100.htm The very title of the piece, is deliberately inflammatory. Solid, empirically based reports by groups like Human Rights Watch, which, I remind y'all, has staffers like Reed Brophy, author of , "Contra Terror In Nicaragua, " from South End Press in 1986 and Joe Stork, ex-editor of the leftist MERIP journal on the Middle East, was recently interviwed by the editors of, "Rethinking Marxism." Those pesky postmodernist, post-Althusserians that take civil society and Hardt and Negri seriously. For a counterpoint to the Aijaz Ahmed, see the scholarship of French leftist, anti-racist, Pierre-Andre Taguieff, available in a recent book on anti-racism from Univ. of Minnesota Press and a new one, if you read French, "La Nouvelle Judeophobia, " (The New Judeophobia). Telos, when it made it turn towards paleo-conservatism away from Frankfurt School neo-marxism, in their special double issue on the French New Right, published several of taguieff's stinging rebuttals to the leading French New Right intellectuals who have incorporated motifs of 60's "leftist" anti-imperialist discourse into their nasty brew. (The new book by Kristin Ross on May '68 from Univ. of Chicago Press also provides some background on the shifting currents of ideological fashion in France occasioned by the very late discovery in the late 70's of what Pierre Rousset (a neo-Trotskyist intellctual aligned with Sartre briefly after WWII) tried to alert them to, namely the camps in the fSU. Ah but, as Jean Paul Sartre defensively said, the workers in Billaincourt in the PCF's Red Belt could not bear to hear the truth and, in his break with Maurice Merleau-Ponty circa the Korean War said, "An anti-Communist Is A Rat." Took Sartre, until '68 to wake up from that.(See, "The Socialism That Came In From From The Cold, " by Sartre on the Warsaw Pact invasion of socialist Czechoslovakia in '68. Michael Pugliese, http://www.ultra-leftistcantwatch.com and http://neokonservatismus- kulturbolshewismus.com and http://dwightmacdonaldwouldbehorrified.com and http://www.marxistsagainst barrackscommunism.com -------------------------- http://www.flonnet.com/fl1908/19080100.htm Aijaz Ahmad is a regular writer for Frontline. He's never been known to be fond of finely crafted distinctions. He's a polemicist, and more than a few of his polemics misfire. (Calling him PoMo is a bit rich, though, since his best known polemic, "In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures" is a broadside on PoMos). Here's a sense of the flavor of the article, and the closest thing I find to a justification of the title. The point that Israel is actively acting on the model of the Nazis was made, for example, by Assaf Oran, one of the more than one thousand Israeli reservists who have refused military duty in the current war on the Palestinian people, in an 'Open Letter to American Jews' which he published on the eve of Passover this year, in response to a massive outpouring of anger against his 'refusenik' comrades: "Where were all these holy souls, who now scold Tikkun [an organisation supporting 'refuseniks'] because they indirectly allude to the Nazi horrors, where were they all when a senior IDF [Israeli Defence Forces] officer proudly called, 'in order to beat the Palestinians, let's be Judeo-Nazis'." The well-known Israeli daily Ma'ariv has also quoted an Israeli officer exhorting his men to study the tactics adopted by the Nazis during the Second World War: "If our job is to seize a densely packed refugee camp or take over the Nablus Casbah, and if this job is to be given to an Israeli officer to carry out without casualties he must before all else analyse and bring together the lessons of past battles, even - shocking though this might appear - to analyse how the German Army operated in the Warsaw Ghetto." |