Propaganda by Edward L. Bernays (pdf)

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Aug 30 2006 21:18 utc | 4

Slothrop,
your error lies in the assumption (logical for a Westerner) that there is such a thing as a Lebanese state. There isn’t and never has been since its inception. Titles for dignitaries are only smoke screens. Lebanon has never been anything but an uneasy agglomeration of hostile sectarian groups that have either been doing their own thing, or trying to lord over everyone by pretending to be that non-existant state.

Posted by: Guthman Bey | Aug 30 2006 21:32 utc | 6

Think I’ve read more Bernays, here, than I can stomach, frankly, $cam.

Posted by: Ms Manners | Aug 30 2006 21:48 utc | 8

Another error by slothrop may be assuming that Hezbollah merely won symbolically by surviving. But for example the War Nerd thinks otherwise:

an Israeli columnist I read, who said, “If a lightweight boxer fights a heavyweight and gets a draw, the lightweight won.” Except I’m not sure it was even a draw. I think Hezbollah flat-out won, not just in PR/Propaganda terms but by anybody’s standards. They’re in total control of the field of battle, Southern Lebanon — I hope none of you are dumb enough to think that this “International Peacekeeping Force” is going to actually try to disarm Hezbollah after the Israelis couldn’t do it by force of arms. And I’ll throw y’all a little curve by arguing that Hezbollah may even have had a smaller casualty count than the IDF.

I myself analysed facts of the ground war and found Israel indeed looking like a loser.

Posted by: DoDo | Aug 30 2006 22:34 utc | 10

and the belief in a pan-shiism, including iran, diasporic arab shia, and syria/lebanon seems ludicrously detached from the realities of historical animus among shia factions.

Posted by: slothrop | Aug 30 2006 22:47 utc | 12

ms
doesn’t surprise me you’d confuse analysis for belief

Posted by: slothrop | Aug 30 2006 23:40 utc | 14

I don’t think acknowledgment of israel by hiz is necessarily a “submission” in the same way that acknowledgment by whoever represents palestinians is always a submission, no matter what.
i have more questions than answers, and i defer here to others who have the experience of the stateless human denied forever a place to call home. there judgment of the events will always be better than mine.

Posted by: slothrop | Aug 31 2006 0:39 utc | 16

“i have more questions than answers, and i defer here to others who have the experience of the stateless human denied forever a place to call home.”
It’s called Little Green Football Land.
I’ll talk to some folks, through intermediaries,and see if we can’t get you a permanent Guest Worker Visa, there.

Posted by: Ms Manners | Aug 31 2006 1:36 utc | 18

What has happened to r’giap?

Posted by: theodor | Aug 31 2006 2:10 utc | 20

theodor- most recent update we rcvd was that r’giap was bunkered down w/ dylan & a non-functioning computer. arrangements are underway to address the latter in order that transmissions can be restored. if conchita drops in tonite, she may have more info.

Posted by: b real | Aug 31 2006 2:46 utc | 22

This discussion is a little hard to follow, but I just wanted to point out that claims that Hezbollah wants to destroy Israel or “drive the Jews into the sea” are false, inaccurate descriptions of Hezbollah’s political stance.
Since the 2000 Israeli withdrawl from Lebanon — and especially post-2003 — Hezbollah has softened their prior hard-line stance with respect to Israel, and they have stated that they would be in favor of an equitable two state solution to the Palestinian issue. The problem for Hezbollah is that the media and pro-Israel commentators love dredging up old, bombastic quotations by Hezbollah leaders and painting them as the organization’s current position. (Frankly, Hezbollah’s extreme animosity towards Israel, while distasteful, was understandable during the occupation, and their philosophical softening after the end of the occupation was also reasonable and understandable, though perhaps not swift enough.)
Obviously, the claim that “Hezbollah wants to drive the Jews into the sea” is rhetorical manna for Israeli defenders, even though it is a cartoonish and inaccurate description of the current policy of a rational political organization. They are not mindless terrorists bent on slaughtering the Jews, and claims to that effect are childish nonsense meant to inspire fear and eliminate rational debate.

Posted by: Alan | Aug 31 2006 3:02 utc | 24

Citizen,
what you call “coming to terms with the existence of Israel” means appeasement of a belligerent state of Judeo-fascist fanatics. (And unlike the so-called Islamofascism, Zionism does in fact have authentically fascist roots). The so-called two state solution is a mirage, a complete impossibility once the right of return of the Palestinians is acknowledged. And 50 years on the Palestinians haven’t gone anywhere: most of them still live in camps, they have multiplied, they are still waiting to go back. In the face of this persistent claim, all peace treaties signed with Israel by US puppets are long-term meaningless. Regimes change. “Coming to terms” with Israel is totally out of the question to the vast majority of citizens in the surrounding countries. And right they are: Israel has no more right to exist than Ian Smith’s Rhodesia had.

Posted by: Guthman Bey | Aug 31 2006 4:24 utc | 26

GB: I admire your forthrightness and but rumsfeldian obdurateness is lousy strategy.

Posted by: citizen k | Aug 31 2006 4:33 utc | 28

Here is a powerful piece by an Israeli journalist in today’s Haaretz. Amira Hass often writes about Palestinian lives, but this is fairly explicit and direct even for her. It is, I think, important to read.
Can you really not see?
By Amira Hass (www.haaretz.com)

Let us leave aside those Israelis whose ideology supports the dispossession of the Palestinian people because “God chose us.” Leave aside the judges who whitewash every military policy of killing and destruction. Leave aside the military commanders who knowingly jail an entire nation in pens surrounded by walls, fortified observation towers, machine guns, barbed wire and blinding projectors. Leave aside the ministers. All of these are not counted among the collaborators. These are the architects, the planners, the designers, the executioners.
But there are others. Historians and mathematicians, senior editors, media stars, psychologists and family doctors, lawyers who do not support Gush Emunim and Kadima, teachers and educators, lovers of hiking trails and sing-alongs, high-tech wizards. Where are you? And what about you, researchers of Nazism, the Holocaust and Soviet gulags? Could you all be in favor of systematic discriminating laws? Laws stating that the Arabs of the Galilee will not even be compensated for the damages of the war by the same sums their Jewish neighbors are entitled to (Aryeh Dayan, Haaretz , August 21).
Could it be that you are all in favor of a racist Citizenship Law that forbids an Israeli Arab from living with his family in his own home? That you side with further expropriation of lands and the demolishing of additional orchards, for another settler neighborhood and another exclusively Jewish road? That you all back the shelling and missile fire killing the old and the young in the Gaza Strip?
Could it be that you all agree that a third of the West Bank (the Jordan Valley) should be off limits to Palestinians? That you all side with an Israeli policy that prevents tens of thousands of Palestinians who have obtained foreign citizenship from returning to their families in the occupied territories?
Could your mind really be so washed with the security excuse, used to forbid Gaza students from studying occupational therapy at Bethlehem and medicine at Abu Dis, and preventing sick people from Rafah from receiving medical treatment in Ramallah? Will also you find it easy to hide behind the explanation “we had no idea”: we had no idea that the discrimination practiced in the distribution of water – which is solely controlled by Israel – leaves thousands of Palestinian households without water during the hot summer months; we had no idea that when the IDF blocks the entrance to villages, it also blocks their access to springs or water tanks.
But it cannot be that you don’t see the iron gates along route 344 in the West Bank, blocking access to it from the Palestinian villages it passes by. It cannot be that you support preventing the access of thousands of farmers to their land and plantations, that you support the quarantine on Gaza which prevents the entry of medicine for hospitals, the disruption of electricity and water supply to 1.4 million human beings, closing their only outlet to the world for months.
Could it be that you do not know what is happening 15 minutes from your faculties and offices? Is it plausible that you support the system in which Hebrew soldiers, at checkpoints in the heart of the West Bank, are letting tens of thousands of people wait everyday for hours upon hours under the blazing sun, while selecting: residents of Nablus and Tul Karm are not allowed through, 35-year-olds and under – yallah, back to Jenin, residents of the Salem village are not even allowed to be here, a sick woman who skipped the line must learn a lesson and will be purposefully detained for hours. Machsom Watch’s site is available for all; in it are countless such testimonies and worse, a day by day routine. But it cannot be that those who are appalled over every swastika painted on a Jewish grave in France and over every anti-Semitic headline in a Spanish local newspaper will not know how to reach this information, and will not be appalled and outraged.
As Jews we all enjoy the privilege Israel gives us, what makes us all collaborators. The question is what does every one of us do in an active and direct daily manner to minimize cooperation with a dispossessing, suppressing regime that never has its fill. Signing a petition and tutting will not do. Israel is a democracy for its Jews. We are not in danger of our lives, we will not be jailed in concentration camps, our livelihood will not be damaged and recreation in the countryside or abroad will not be denied to us. Therefore, the burden of collaboration and direct responsibility is immeasurably heavy.

Posted by: Bea | Aug 31 2006 4:45 utc | 30

thanks for the info. I remember r’giap as more a Van Morrison guy…

Posted by: theodor | Aug 31 2006 6:37 utc | 32

GB: In this analysis you are 100% in agreement with Likud, perhaps you are right. I’m dubious. The more success Hibollah has, the more it has to lose in an all out war – which is why the Israeli strategy of making the Palestinians desperate is so suicidal. But what you wrote earlier is something I cannot make sense of. You wrote “”Coming to terms” with Israel is totally out of the question to the vast majority of citizens in the surrounding countries. And right they are: Israel has no more right to exist than Ian Smith’s Rhodesia had.. Can you explain to me what you mean by the right of a state to exist? This seems to me to be meaningless. States exist as long as they can retain their monopoly on organized violence within their territories. That is, “existence” is a matter of power, not moral judgement. So what does “right” mean in this sense? And it appears to me that the existence of Israel has precisely the same impact on the lives of most ME citizens as the existence of gay marriage has on most US citizens and it serves precisely the same function for internal politics in many ME states.

Posted by: citizen k | Aug 31 2006 14:22 utc | 34

@citizen k
the existence of Israel has precisely the same impact on the lives of most ME citizens as the existence of gay marriage has on most US citizens and it serves precisely the same function for internal politics in many ME states
Here your mind has been bamboozled by the pro-Isareli US press. What impact did the existence of Apartheid South Africa have on other countries? On a day to day basis, none. Are you suggesting…? No you aren’t, of course not. So think again.

Posted by: Guthman Bey | Aug 31 2006 16:11 utc | 36

You want to paint in shades of grey citizen, you paint in shades of grey. That is your privilege. Everything is relative. All life ends in death no matter what happens.

Posted by: Guthman Bey | Aug 31 2006 16:35 utc | 38

GB: Well, getting some shading in can produce a more accurate picture than black and white sometimes. I’m suspicious of slogans.
Ran: I’m not at all in a position to say what either Israel or Palestinians could or should have done to avoid the current apparently hopeless morass. If the Palestinians had not walked into Black September and had been able to take control of Jordan, they’d be in a much stronger position. Could that have happened? If they had gone to a civil disobedience strategy instead of terror, I think it would have strengthened their position a lot. People make a mistake thinking that MLK and Ghandi were too cowardly to fight, they chose their paths from cold tactics and rational assessment of the chances of success. Israel is not a singualar point, the terror tactics of the PLO/etc have only helped the far right (and vice-versa) without actually accomplishing anything positive for the Palestinians. This is my disagreement with GB – the whole argument about “who is right” is counter-productive. Mandela did not act out of sheer goodness of heart, in fact, he would have been a fool to do so. He struck the best deal he could find – switching from legal battles to civil disobedience to war to negotiation with the people who tortured his friends to death as dictated by the circumstances. The Palestinians, caught between the US interests in Israeli client status and the Arab state interests in a distracting “martyr” people, may not have ever had the option. After all, when the ANC went into Tanzania, they were able to organize a military operation instead of being confined to squalid camps and told to go blow themselves up for the glory of Africa.
At this point, I bet on it being hopeless. I think that Israel will pick “transfer some and make the rest miserable enough to leave” and that the Israeli state will lurch ever rightward until it becomes another Guatemala and then, eventually, collapses, possibly after a nuclear exchange.

Posted by: citizen k | Aug 31 2006 17:36 utc | 40

On a more general note, IIRC even Ghandi said somewhere that his method works when a majority is supressed by a minority (British colonialists in India, Boers in South Africa). Given Israel’s expansionism (settlements), its Israelis vs. Palestinians in all of the former Palestine Mandate. Plus, since Ghandi’s time, there is television politics — what exists is what is shown on TV, and even masses of protesters can be ignored or spinned (we saw that during the Iraq War, didn’t we).

Posted by: DoDo | Aug 31 2006 20:03 utc | 42

Billmon: If nominated I will not run, if elected I will exterminate the infidel Zionist scum! Um, I mean, I will not serve.
John Francis Lee: Is that throw away “laugh line” of Billmon’s a reflection of reality? I read an interview with Seymour Hersh on Democracy Now! wherein Hersh sympathetically compared Nasrallah with Archbishop O’Connell of New York.
Indeed from my reading of his various utterances, Nasrallah position is that Israel could a) turn from illegitimate into legitimate state by way of a fair agreement with Palestinians about a separate Palestinian state, b) cease to exist while its population becomes citizens of a unified, racially blind state of Palestine, or c) cease to exist while the bulk of its population moves away, say to the USA.
BTW, a note to everyone: a lot of rhetoric commonly accredited to various opponents of Israel is actually succesful Israeli propaganda: e.g. a mis-translation (MEMRI for help!), a quote out of context or with partial omissions, or completely made up. The last category includes the most-quoted “driving Israel into the sea” line, which, as I recently learned via Angry Arab, is credited not to a Hezbollah leader but a Palestinian leader before Arafat, without reliable source and against that (long ago killed) leaders’ later denials.

Posted by: DoDo | Aug 31 2006 20:22 utc | 44

Dodo: Yeah, I’m aware of that and I know that civil disobedience has been something that the Israeli government has seen, for good reason, as the most dangerous threat. But the Palestinian leadership cooperated with the Israelis in making this a terror war, and that was a bad tactic (of course, the Israelis worked hard to ensure the dominance of the most violent and extremist elements). So maybe it’s been hopeless all along. But I am convinced that if there is a 0.1% chance of something better than a catostrophic conclusion (or an Irish style 400 year war) the way to that is not by dumb slogans about “no right to exist” for states that have big armies and nuclear weapons and nowhere to go. In all the endless sloganeering about how Israel “must” be replaced by a mythical secular state that will be conjured out of somewhere, I have never heard a single even slightly plausible scenario of how that would happen.

Posted by: citizen k | Aug 31 2006 20:45 utc | 46

the most-quoted “driving Israel into the sea” line, which, as I recently learned via Angry Arab, is credited not to a Hezbollah leader but a Palestinian leader before Arafat, without reliable source and against that (long ago killed) leaders’ later denials.
kind of like the “spitting on returning vets” meme — durable, apparently ineradicable, and apparently invented or spontaneously generated to meet ideological need?

Posted by: DeAnander | Aug 31 2006 21:09 utc | 48

why do palestinians want to drive israeli jews into the sea?
Are you aware that Israeli Zionists, during the 1948 war, pushed over 150,000 Palestinian refugees into the sea?
jaffa palestinians pushed into the sea

Posted by: annie | Aug 31 2006 21:25 utc | 50

As Jews we all enjoy the privilege Israel gives us, what makes us all collaborators. The question is what does every one of us do in an active and direct daily manner to minimize cooperation with a dispossessing, suppressing regime that never has its fill. Signing a petition and tutting will not do. Israel is a democracy for its Jews. We are not in danger of our lives, we will not be jailed in concentration camps, our livelihood will not be damaged and recreation in the countryside or abroad will not be denied to us. Therefore, the burden of collaboration and direct responsibility is immeasurably heavy.
The last paragraph of Amira Hass’s piece can also be applied to us Americans, I think.

Posted by: lysias | Aug 31 2006 21:37 utc | 52

I have also fought against the incursions of US, Japanese and Javanese colonialism in the streets of Manila, the jungles of Mindanao and the hills of Timor Leste.
Not to mention your courageous battles against bitchy divorced women and the zionists in your junior high school. Cripes, it’s a disgrace that you haven’t been called to Oslo already.

Posted by: Anonymous | Aug 31 2006 22:08 utc | 54

I’m not sure Rhodesia and South Africa were doomed to fail from the start. If the Zionists had settled in one of the places they originally considered, Uganda, it occurs to me that, with the support of such a determined group as the Zionist Jews in their area, it might have been possible to preserve white colonial rule in South Africa, Southern Rhodesia, and even Kenya.

Posted by: lysias | Aug 31 2006 23:09 utc | 56

Villagers See Violations of a Cease-Fire That Israel Says Doesn’t Exist

Secretary General Kofi Annan cited numbers from the United Nations forces on Tuesday indicating that Israel had violated the cease-fire nearly 70 times, while Hezbollah had done so only 4 times.
But the Israelis do not believe there is a cease-fire to violate. “We are at a cessation of hostilities in Lebanon, not a cease-fire,” Ms. Eisin said. She added that Israel had the explicit right to self-defense under United Nations Resolution 1701, which does not use the term cease-fire.
That difference is apparent every day across southern Lebanon. Israeli tanks crisscross the dry brown hills, shooting into the fields and smashing up houses and stone walls. Teams of Israeli soldiers have planted their nation’s flag atop bluffs here and sometimes detained Lebanese men, releasing them days later. No one seems to know where the mobile Israeli units are based, or how to avoid them.

Posted by: b | Sep 1 2006 4:17 utc | 58

Thanks to all, in particular to citizen k and Guthman Bey and Annie, for managing to keep this thread at an exceptionally high level. I find the
civility with which sharply differing views have been presented, debated, and defended truly remarkable given the all-too-frequent tendency for the topics of such a thread to quickly lead to jejune name calling and fruitless acrimony. Of course, the occasional bit of snarkery or not so gentle ribbing is also enjoyable, and, I hope, not taken to heart by the the targets.

Annie’s link to a page from the Palestine Remembered is especially interesting, and perhaps even hopeful: some of the pages on that obviously anti-zionist site have Hebrew versions. I assume (but don’t know) that there are analogous pro-zionist sites with Arabic versions.

Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Sep 1 2006 7:02 utc | 60

Your arguments are very much along the lines of Sharon who pointed out that nobody argues the legitimacy of states that have completed ethnic cleansing. The US, Australia, NZ and Paraguay are states that are majority supported due to genocide.

I’ve read this argument here several times and it always strikes me as degenerate moralizing. It’s the same sort of argument Bush and “the boys, and girl” use when they assert that we have to send more forces to murder and be murdered in Iraq to “honor” the lives already utterly wasted there.
The idea is that mistakes have been made in the past and we now have the right, or duty to repeat those same mistakes now, and he is a hypocrite who insists that is not true.
Life is not a deterministic process. Choices can and have and will be made. I choose to avoid the mistakes of the past to the extent that I am capable of doing so. Someone said it’s the only way to escape the cycle of rebirth with no memory.

Posted by: John Francis Lee | Sep 1 2006 10:42 utc | 62

I choose to avoid the mistakes of the past to the extent that I am capable of doing so. Someone said it’s the only way to escape the cycle of rebirth with no memory.
That’s interesting JF Lee. Who said that, do you know?
@citizen
Pure argumentative defense aims to destroy any discussion by making all viewpoints appear completely arbitrary. That’s great for the court-room when you are a lawyer and have but one unambiguous outcome in mind: getting off your client. In politics this anti-argumentation gives you, via the negation of objective reason, the Hobbesian ‘homo homini lupus’ and a binary outcome: the cult of pure power for the bold and the cult of impotence the cowardly.

Posted by: Guthman Bey | Sep 1 2006 13:46 utc | 64

Citizen,
I didn’t say the cult of pure power was your cult. I said it was a binary outcome…

Posted by: Guthman Bey | Sep 1 2006 14:36 utc | 66

I was paraphrasing the Buddha, as I understand him, on the “price we have to pay to get out of going through all these things twice.”
By degenerate moralizing I meant mixing things we can do nothing about, like the past, with things we can do something about, like the present, and using the former as justification for the latter.
Like using the Hobbsean notion of “human nature” to justify one’s own rapacity and the application of authoritarian methods to forestall others’.
There’s a startlingly current example of this view, preserved like an insect in amber, available at Asia Times Online under the byline of Spengler.

Posted by: John Francis Lee | Sep 1 2006 14:54 utc | 68

JFL: The first part of the “Sharon” argument in the Oz interview is impossible to refute. If the Jews of Europe had stopped mooning about with ineffectual bullshit about world peace or the messiah or whatever, and had moved to Palestine, put a million Palestinian Arabs in mass graves, and built a unified greater Israel, the “world” would be as concerned about the Palestininian survivors as it was about the Jewish survivors or Turkish Armenians, or as it is about the people of Darfour. That is what is, like it or not. To pretend otherwise is to embrace delusion. But it’s not necessary to follow “Sharon” or Hobbes or Kissinger to the next step. To me, being a cog in a bloodstained flourishing state is not a positive outcome either.

Posted by: citizen k | Sep 1 2006 15:19 utc | 70

JBC: If you want to refute Sharon, you have understand both the truth and the powerful appeal of Sharon. You cannot compete against Ronald Reagan’s “new morning in America” by citing sections of the UN charter. People respond to tribal messages and not to procedural whinging. But that’s as far as I know right now.

Posted by: citizen k | Sep 1 2006 16:15 utc | 72

Guthman Bey:
I followed your link to the interview with Sharon. It reminded me of the neocons here in American and in Israel. It reminded me of someone with AIDS, or another contagious and fatal disease, who does his best to infect others so that his “misery will have company”.
It shows just how deformed, how misshapen a human can become once he’s embraced death as Sharon, the Israelis, and the neocons all have.
It doesn’t have to be this way. We could take control of “our” government and defund the neocons and their wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine, stand back from the abyss, let the sun shine in on these pustulants, as on dracula, the undead.
For the neocons are very like dracula. They are sucking our financial life’s blood and we are dying not just from the loss of that blood but from the raging, red-eyed bloodlust that is the worst effect of the vampire’s fanged kiss.
But it will take stakes driven through their hearts to end them. Look at them now. They’ve all bitten us before, drained us before, maddened us before : Abrams, Cheney, Negroponte, Rumsfeld… they’re all the undead.

Posted by: John Francis Lee | Sep 1 2006 17:15 utc | 74

GB: If you can come up with a coherent refutation of “C” go ahead. You seem to be under the impression that acknowledging the bloody nature of the world is endorsement, or that pretending history is a tea party consitutes effective opposition.

Posted by: citizen k | Sep 1 2006 17:43 utc | 76

Citizen,
Refute? What’s there to refute? How sick does one have to be to even want to refute a character like that! (btw. I doubt this is Sharon: this sounds more like an operatic rendition of Sharon by the very slick Tsahal worshipping SOB Amos Oz). Refute Hitler? You can’t be serious…
Hiler and Sharon don’t make feel ill, they make me feel ANGRY. A-N-G-R-Y. (Careful: forbidden emotion in the Church of the Holy Impotency).

Posted by: Guthman Bey | Sep 1 2006 20:55 utc | 78

1. He also said that even with the explosion of fundamental Islam throughout the ME, in the last few years, Israel seems to have far more women oppressed into wearing ‘modest’ clothing, which in terms of ‘covering up’ is just as all enveloping as Islamic women, the most notable difference being that the fundie jewish women wear the most baltantly false looking wigs under their headscarves, something which wins the grotesqueness stakes hands down.
Do they have fake beards to? Sorry, I just can not get the images from the stoning-sequence of Life of Brain to go away…
2. Clarifying note (mainly to Guthman Bey but this pops up ever so often): we have both a ‘citizen’ and a ‘citizen k’ among our regulars. As citizen has not been very active on this thread it is easy to understand to whom comments has been directed, but that may not be the case in the future.

Posted by: a swedish kind of death | Sep 1 2006 21:33 utc | 80

That difference is apparent every day across southern Lebanon. Israeli tanks crisscross the dry brown hills, shooting into the fields and smashing up houses and stone walls. Teams of Israeli soldiers have planted their nation’s flag atop bluffs here and sometimes detained Lebanese men, releasing them days later. No one seems to know where the mobile Israeli units are based, or how to avoid them.
except for the price tags on their armaments, not much different from the roaming Janjaweed or the roaming mercs of the 30 years’ war… tribal militias reverting to tribal barbarism, a nomansland of thuggish, random gang violence. driveby shootings using state of the art heavy armour. but the gangstas semicovertly encouraged by nation-state power players in their depredations. there were Yank units in Viet Nam that behaved the same, wandering at will w/o explicit direction, killing and looting: a breakdown of the ROE of conventional warfare, but imho a LIHOP breakdown on the part of high command. they “accidentally” lose control of their pet pitbulls and thus enable deniable extralegal terrorism… did the Soviet troops who overran Berlin at the end of WWII really “get out of control” or did their own higher LIHOP to inflict collective punishment on the fallen city?
terrorism is the war of the poor, war is the terrorism of the rich, as I believe P Ustinov said…

Posted by: DeAnander | Sep 1 2006 22:40 utc | 82

GB: Peace to you as well. And no apologies either.
Litany for Dictators.

Posted by: citizen k | Sep 2 2006 2:16 utc | 84

also, i learn from this thread the irrefragable existence of israel, until such time she, exhausted by the pathetic effort to be jewish and a democracy at once, collapses in as heap of contradictions. and irrefragable in name only, survives as the homeland of people who care only about the possibility of coexistence.

Posted by: slothrop | Sep 2 2006 3:37 utc | 86

Since GB wants to compare South Africa to Israel, I thought it would be useful to compare the ANC to PLO/Hamas.
Here is the start of the 1955 ANC Freedom Charter

We, the People of South Africa, declare for all our country and the world to know:
that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all the people;
that our people have been robbed of their birthright to land, liberty and peace by a form of government founded on injustice and inequality;
that our country will never be prosperous or free until all our people live in brotherhood, enjoying equal rights and opportunities;
that only a democratic state, based on the will of all the people, can secure to all their birthright without distinction of colour, race, sex or belief;
And therefore, we, the people of South Africa, black and white together equals, countrymen and brothers adopt this Freedom Charter;
And we pledge ourselves to strive together, sparing neither strength nor courage, until the democratic changes here set out have been won.

Here is the PLO charter

rticle 1: Palestine is the homeland of the Arab Palestinian people; it is an indivisible part of the Arab homeland, and the Palestinian people are an integral part of the Arab nation.
Article 2: Palestine, with the boundaries it had during the British Mandate, is an indivisible territorial unit.
[…]
Article 5: The Palestinians are those Arab nationals who, until 1947, normally resided in Palestine regardless of whether they were evicted from it or have stayed there. Anyone born, after that date, of a Palestinian father – whether inside Palestine or outside it – is also a Palestinian.
Article 6: The Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion will be considered Palestinians.

Here is a choice passage from the Hamas charter of 1988

The Zionist invasion is a vicious invasion. It does not refrain from resorting to all methods, using all evil and contemptible ways to achieve its end. It relies greatly in its infiltration and espionage operations on the secret organizations it gave rise to, such as the Freemasons, The Rotary and Lions clubs, and other sabotage groups. All these organizations, whether secret or open, work in the interest of Zionism and according to its instructions. They aim at undermining societies, destroying values, corrupting consciences, deteriorating character and annihilating Islam. It is behind the drug trade and alcoholism in all its kinds so as to facilitate its control and expansion.

And this one is good too

Nationalism, from the point of view of the Islamic Resistance Movement, is part of the religious creed. Nothing in nationalism is more significant or deeper than in the case when an enemy should tread Moslem land. Resisting and quelling the enemy become the individual duty of every Moslem, male or female. A woman can go out to fight the enemy without her husband’s permission, and so does the slave: without his master’s permission.

Posted by: citizen k | Sep 2 2006 13:28 utc | 88

Citizen,
all viewpoints in the Palestinian conflict are more radical, since the situation is more radical: Apartheid South Africa didn’t ethnically cleanse millions to create a white majority. It didn’t import millions of settlers to “colonize” stolen land. Compared to the Israelis, the Boers were tame indeed. Also, the Boers consider themselves “African”, they call their language “Afrikaans”. They didn’t sign up South Africa for the European Song Contest and European football competitions.
The PLO charter was drawn up in 1968. Prior to that there was no Palestinian resistance movement whatsoever.
The 1968 charta describes a situation as it objectively existed then.
The ANC demanded nothing more than what was theirs as a “matter of course” once racialism was discarded. The ANC was also an umbrella movement and had components, such as the SA Communist Party, which had their own radical agendas.
Apartheid South Africa also never got to the stage where they actively helped create an enemy in their own image, as Israel did with Hamas.
The dialects of the situation are different and more extreme. The fight is nonetheless a good one and it will go on.

Posted by: Guthman Bey | Sep 2 2006 15:09 utc | 90

While the dialects of the situation are different too, what I meant to say was dialectics.

Posted by: Guthman Bey | Sep 2 2006 15:34 utc | 92

Apartheid South Africa didn’t ethnically cleanse millions to create a white majority.
Yes it did. There was a massive and decades long effort to clear out black settlement in white cities and farming areas. The “bantustans” were created by displacing millions of people. The destruction of the mixed race section of CapeTown was only one incident in many (here)
You have no idea what you are talking about. Fully 80% of the land mass of SA was declared white only and blacks were forbidden to own land in those areas.
It didn’t import millions of settlers to “colonize” stolen land.
Where do you think all those Dutch and British white south africans came from? Sprung out of the Orange river, fully grown and pale as death, to the utter amazement of the locals? White South Africa aggressively recruited portugese, germans, dutch, and australians through the 1970s.
Also, the Boers consider themselves “African”, they call their language “Afrikaans”.
Well, aside from the fact that the Israelis consider themselves to be middle easterners and over half of Jewish israelis are mizrahim you have the Boers all wrong. They considered themselves the outpost of white european civilization. Here is the famous Dr. Verwoerd.

” When I have control of “Native” education, I will reform it so that the “Natives” will be taught from childhood to realize that equality with Europeans is not for them.” (1953)

If you want an example Israeli who doesn’t consider himself European, you can start with Bomber Halutz who has Iranian heritage. Is it not heartwarming to see that even someone from an underpriviliged and oppressed minority can rise up to practice one of the greatest contributions Europeans have made to world civilization – areo bombardment of civilians?
They [the Boers] didn’t sign up South Africa for the European Song Contest and European football competitions.
I’m tempted to grant you this point only because Eurovision is so revolting that participation by any nation should be forbidden, but I wonder if you think that Turkey’s attempt to enter the EU and participation in Eurovision is likewise evidence of the european settler nature of the Turkish government?
If you want to denounce the Israeli participation in European Song Contest, you can make common cause with the Israeli Religious Fanatics who see it as a signpost of decadent secularism and worse (see this hilarious account) that starts with

ULTRA-ORTHODOX Jews are threatening to disrupt next weekend’s Eurovision Song Contest in Jerusalem because they are furious that last year’s winner, an Israeli transsexual, plans to sing a number that combines the words of a psalm with a Stevie Wonder hit.

No wonder Hamas is so exercised about the Masons! In fact, it’s one of God’s nasty jokes that Israel is pretty far along in transforming from a european colony into a modern middle eastern theocracy, although with much more ethnic diversity than normal. Hamas, the Council of Looney Tunes Rabbis, Taliban, and Iranian and Saudi religious governments have a great deal of shared ideology and history. The secular “de-nationalized” Jews of Tel Aviv, scoffers, homos, trans-national, un-kosher, night-club frequenting, degenerates are despised by them all for the same reasons.

Posted by: citizen k | Sep 2 2006 16:11 utc | 94

The “bantustans” were created by displacing millions of people.
The bantustans were located within South Africa. The equivalent of what the Israelis have done would have been the expulsion of the large majority of the black population from South Africa proper.
The Boer self-image as non-European is evidenced by the name they chose for themselves, Afrikaner, and for their language, Afrikaans, commentary by racist ideologues from the 1950s notwithstanding.
I am not trying to defend what White Supremacists did in South Africa. It is the things they didn’t do that made it possible to find common ground: for example they didn’t murder Mandela.
It is all a matter of degree: the Israelis have been infinitely more radical in their approach. They have engineered the radical “solutions” that were intensely thought about by South Africa but never carried out beyond half-measures, such as: “creating” a jewish majority, annexing further “biblical” lands, assassinating the more able Palestinian leaders, going nuclear etc.
The Third Temple is still missing in this picture, but isn’t it something to look forward to…
It is hard to understand why you try to minimize Israeli radicalism on the one hand, when you yourself hold out “C/Sharon’s” operatic delirium of necessary terror as irrefuteable on the other. That makes your entire argument — irrespective of whether I agree with it or not —- completely incoherent. Which brings us back to basic motivations: You try to make it all look arbitrary and for a reason. So yes: I question your basic motives.

Posted by: Guthman Bey | Sep 2 2006 17:45 utc | 96

The bantustans were located within South Africa. The equivalent of what the Israelis have done would have been the expulsion of the large majority of the black population from South Africa proper.
So you are arguing that Gaza and WestBank are not part of historic Palestine proper? Where the fuck are they? In Poland? South Africa moved people from “white areas” to Bantustans and ghettos. There is no difference except that the SA government moved more people and over more bitter objections.
The Boer self-image as non-European is evidenced by the name they chose for themselves, Afrikaner, and for their language, Afrikaans, commentary by racist ideologues from the 1950s notwithstanding.
GB, the sad fact is that you know absolutely nothing about South Africa. Names don’t mean anything: anti-semites hate Jews, not Arabs, “republicans” are not in favor of the republican form of government, and “pied noirs” did not actually have black feet.
It doesn’t matter what the Afrikaaners called themselves, their government and Nationalist Party considered them to be very much not “africans”, they constantly plead for support from the West in the name of common heritage, and the entire country was full of signs that said things like “Europeans only”. Don’t dig this hole any deeper, you are operating on pure ideology and gross ignorance of what really happened.
They have engineered the radical “solutions” that were intensely thought about by South Africa but never carried out beyond half-measures, such as: “creating” a jewish majority, annexing further “biblical” lands, assassinating the more able Palestinian leaders, going nuclear etc.
South Africa “created” white majority where it needed and in fact claimed to be operating a democracy because Africans voted in the Bantu states, it invaded Angola, it assassinated among many others Steve Biko and Ruth Fisher, and it went nuclear. Every single statement you make is wrong.
The Sharon/C argument is that nations operate on the basis of power. He was right. Even good governments, like that of post-apartheid South Africa, make brutal decisions “for reasons of state”. Tienamen square didn’t result in a boycott and Sudan will be able to sell oil after the people are Darfour and the South are murdered. Money and guns comprise the business of states. If the Palestinian organizations had spent less time venting, demanding bribes, attacking easy but worthless targets, and relying on either Arab solidarity from states that found them useful miserable and scary successful or the international community from states that didn’t care, and more time figuring out how to be effective, there is some chance that they could have protected their people against the catastrophe that is accelerating in West Bank and Gaza right now. 50 years of huffing and puffing and pointless terror – and you’re still repeating the same crap. The difference between a terrorist organization and a state is success. Hizbolla has made that step as did Israel. The inability of the Palestinian organizations to go there may be due to many factors, but it is the dominant fact.
As for my motive: I don’t like bullshit. I asked you for a definition of when states have the right to exist and you provided one that implies genocide is a path to legitimacy. Your defense when called on that is to attack my motives. Well, I’m sorry. I find genocide unappealing whether it is carried out by minorities or majorities and I don’t buy overly simplistic sloganized descriptions of history. I don’t think those accomplish much. Israel exists. Claiming it does not is magical thinking on par with expecting rose petals to fall on US soldiers in Falujah. Israel’s actions in WestBank and Gaza are grotesque and immoral on their own. Condemnations in the form of meaningless slogans do nothing except obscure things.

Posted by: citizen k | Sep 2 2006 19:20 utc | 98

One thing about South Africa is that expelling the Boers was never a part of the Black or ANC agenda. Hence the struggle against apartheid in South Africa had less of a fear quotient overall.
But it was part of or close to the PAC agenda, and the ANC ruthlessly stomped that out because their objective was to win, not to chest-thump. A resistance movement that falls into authenticity competition is doomed, because a state requires a monopoly on violence and it is inherently amoral. If Ben Gurion had not been able to crush Irgun/Stern, the Israelis would have fractured and lost (in fact, it it possible that the failure to completely root that movement out will eventually doom the Israeli state). And it’s not a question of good or bad, it’s a question of what works. I’m not cheering over the centuries that Shays rebellion was crushed in the early days of the US, but the consolidation of state power seems to be a necessary step in the success of a state. Which brings us to the “Scarcity and Revolution” discussion about the necessity of states.

Posted by: citizen k | Sep 2 2006 20:52 utc | 100