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The MoA Week In Review – Open Thread 2020-14
Last week's posts at Moon of Alabama:
Related: Putin keen to cool Turkish hawk down – Pepe Escobar
An hour ago the Russian air force bombed a convoy of Jihadis and Turkish soldiers near Jabal al Zawiyah. Syrian artillery fired on another Turkish convoy. There were Turkish casualties in both incidents. Erdogan can do nothing about it except to order his troops to retreat.
Related: Intelligence Sources: All Candidates Are Russian Agents But Pete Buttigieg – Caitlin Johnstone National Security Experts Dismiss ‘Hysteria Over Russia’ Allegedly Supporting Bernie Sanders Law and Crime
“One of the best ways to undermine American democracy is for the media to constantly tell Americans that our democratic system is run by a foreign power, that polls [and] debate outcomes are based not on the appeal of our politicians but from the invisible hand of an enemy government,” explained Northeastern University Associate Professor and Quincy Institute Fellow Max Abrahms.
Other issues:
Long reads on the changing global role of the U.S. of A.:
America in Distress: The Challenges of Disadvantageous Change – Chas Freeman Trump’s Vanished ‘Liberal Middles’ – Alastair Crooke
Netanyahoo asks Al Thani to finance Hamas:
Mossad Chief Visited Doha, Urged Qataris to Continue Gaza Financial Aid – Haaretz
Use as open thread …
john brewster @405
I never said that the use of the word “Zionist” is forbidden. I said that there are many different interpretations of the word and as such, it was a meaningless but damaging allegation to make against Sanders. I said that there are many different interpretations of the word and as such, it was a meaningless but damaging allegation to make against Sanders. So straight away, far from insisting on one interpretation on the word “Zionist” – I say quite the reverse; the word has several interpretations (and these interpretations range from the benign to the malign.)
It may not be on this board, but that is increasingly unique. You say there are many interpretations of the word. That is not my experience. I have literally been banned from boards for quoting a 1948 letter signed by Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein denouncing Zionism as
“akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties, one that “preache[s] an admixture of ultra-nationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority.”
I have also been warned and flagged on other fake left boards, such as DKos, for using the term Likudnik. So you will pardon my sensitivity to the “banned word list”.
The issue here, which you try to blow right past, is that Zionism has been conflated with Judaism, so that legitimate questions about Israeli government policy or Likud party policy are declared off-limits with the selective accusation of anti-Semitism. I say selective because, these days, Israel is silent about Ukrainian and Hungarian neo-Nazis
Zionism’s attitude toward anti-Semitism is more ambiguous than people realize. Theodore Herzl, the Viennese journalist who founded modern Zionism, made this clear in the 1890s. Rather than combatting anti-Semitism, he argued that Jews should accept it as an ineradicable fact of life. Instead of opposing it, they should make use of it as a lever with which to pry their co-religionists loose from western society so that they would move to Palestine.
Netanyahu’s Tolerance for Anti-Semitism Goes Back 120 Years
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I wasn’t browbeating the board I was browbeating Jackrabbit and Jackrabbit doesn’t hold back from browbeating either. I am now browbeating you.
Well at least we agree that accusations of browbeating are not anti-Semitic.
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Describing Jews as “self-serving” is not common or benign phraseology – it is an anti-semitic trope.
So you say, but you offer no evidence. The news is full of people of all stripes accusing others of all stripes of being self-serving. It is as common an insult as “corrupt”. But somehow, when directed against someone who is Jewish, it magically becomes anti-semitic . Some kind of newspeak, I guess. OTOH, Zionists calling Jews who object to Zionist policies “self-loathing” is somehow not “anti-semitic”. Nice double standard you got there.
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The use of the word “parasite” in context as “…because Israel is a parasite on the Empire…” is anti-Semitic.
Let me walk you through the chain of reasoning about parasitism. Israel (AIPAC) lobbies heavily for US funds and technology transfers. The absence of those US supports would cause the Israeli government to have severe economic and military problems. OTOH, today’s US is massively underinvested in its own physical and social infrastructure. This is not the 1960s, when the US could easily afford to send all kinds of aid all over the world and still build out the Interstate Highway System. But, according to you, to say that Israel is getting funds desperately needed by US citizens to fix up their own country makes Israel parasitic on the US is anti-semitic. Please explain the flaw in this logic.
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I don’t accept that “at the time, also the victim of deep discrimination just like the blacks”. Jews as a group were comparatively wealthy and did not experience anything like the discrimination experienced by Afro-Americans.
If someone tried to claim that the wealth of black professionals in the ghetto represented all blacks, there would be hell to pay. In case you missed it, many Jewish folks were employed in garment sweatshops, bakeries, and other physically demanding and low paying jobs. But I will let that slide. Let’s talk about your “comparatively wealthy” folks.
By the end of the 19th century, Jews, once accepted as paying guests at boardinghouses, hotels and resorts, were turned away. The rise of nativism in immigration debates led to new “No Israelite” policies and signs advertising “Gentiles Only.” Anti-Semitism limited Jews’ access not only to hotels but also to social and professional clubs, private schools, camps and fraternities. If Jews were lucky enough to gain access, they faced resentment.
Twentieth-century anti-Semitism took new forms. When the prominent industrialist Henry Ford introduced Americans to the idea of a world Jewish conspiracy in his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, his reputation enhanced its respectability. Social exclusion morphed into educational discrimination as Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, Yale and many other schools set quotas on the number of Jews admitted.
In the 1947 Academy Award-winning film “Gentleman’s Agreement,” a journalist played by Gregory Peck pretends to be a Jew to expose the well-known secret of polite society’s discrimination against Jews in hotels, housing, jobs and on the playground.
During the civil rights struggle of the last half of the 1950s, 90 percent of the bombs planted by extremists targeted African Americans; the other 10 percent targeted Jews in their synagogues and community centers and their rabbis at home.
2019 WaPo article
It would seem that being the only non-black group being bombed doesn’t qualify as discrimination in your book. Perhaps because they only received 10% of the bombs.
As for the other items mentioned above, if one is trying to get into or advance in the professions and higher society, then what I just quoted wasn’t innocuous fraternity hazing. (Oh, wait, they weren’t allowed into fraternities.) It was an attempt to shut “comparatively wealthy” people out of entire segments of professional life.
Posted by: john brewster | Feb 26 2020 5:47 utc | 419
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