Sunday, March 27, 2011

Interesting Quotes:

I have not been in the mood for writing anything lately. But I have been reading some hitherto unknown (to me) stuff on the internet. So here are a few quotes that caught my attention:

From "National Journal"


"During the first decade of this century, Stein became enamored of Austrian-Jewish psychologist and philosopher Otto Weininger, whose major work, Geschlecht und Charakter ("Sex and Character"), had tremendous influence on European thinking. Following its first publication in 1903, the book was quickly translated into various languages, and went through 30 editions. Weininger contrasted the masculine "Being" of Aryanism and Christianity with the feminine "non-Being" of Judaism. Jesus was the only Jew to overcome Judaism, he argued. Zionism, in Weininger's view, is the negation of Judaism, because it seeks to ennoble what cannot be ennobled. Whereas Judaism stands for the world dispersion of Jews, Zionism strives for their ingathering."


Who is an Arab Jew? Albert Memmi (1975)


This description of Muslim tolerance stands in stark contradiction to Slavoj Zizek's hyper-euphoric imaginings about which I commented here.


A new look at Zionism from the perspective of universal rights / Ruth Gavison

"The Law of Return is a prime example. The law serves a number of crucial aims, including offering refuge for every Jew and strengthening the Jewish majority in Israel. Its most important task, however, is symbolic. After all, the right of Jews to settle in their land, and the belief that the Jewish state would offer Jews everywhere a place to call home, has always been the lifeblood of Zionism. Thus, when the Law of Return was enacted in 1950, there was a widespread sense that the right of any Jew to immigrate to Israel preceded the state itself; it was a right that the law could declare but not create. Perhaps this particular claim was a bit questionable: There is, in fact, no “natural right” of Jews to immigrate to Israel. Had a Palestinian state been established instead of a Jewish one, it is reasonable to assume that it would not have recognized the right of Jews to move there, nor is it likely that international law would have done so. But once the idea of a Jewish national home became internationally recognized and a Jewish state was established, Israel was fully justified in including the right of all Jews to immigrate there as one of the state’s core principles.
There are those who argue that the Law of Return is racist, one of the clearest proofs that Arab Israelis are the victims of state-sponsored discrimination. This claim is baseless. The law does not discriminate among citizens. It determines who may become one. The principle of repatriation in a nation state is grounded in both political morality and international law. The United Nations’ 1947 resolution approving the establishment of a Jewish state was meant to enable Jews to control immigration to their country. Similar immigration policies based on a preference for people whose nationality is that of the state have been practiced in European countries, including many of the new nation states established after the fall of the Soviet Union. The need to preserve a national majority, especially in cases where the minority belongs to a nation that has its own, adjacent state, is not unique to Israel."

Monday, March 21, 2011

IDF Corporal Levin and Palestinian baby, Jude -->

Hadas Fogel
("He who creates peace
in His celestial heights,
may He create peace
for us and for all Israel;
and say, Amen.") -->


Mother's day:
Malevolence and beneficence

Here is how the blogger, "Angry Arab" sneered at Mother's day celebration in Israel:

Comrade Riyad sent me this: "As a civilized nation, with a deep and abiding commitment to human rights and dignity, the government of Israel is pleased to announce that it will not kill, torture or otherwise abuse any Palestinian children on Mother's day, March 21. The usual torture and killing will promptly resume on March 22, at 12 AM. Happy Mother's day to all."

Why would I even note this calumny?

Here is why:





Update: I forgot about this precedent

Sunday, March 20, 2011

TNR Comments

Atrocity at Itamar
page 2
page 3

Libyan Intervention

Another TNR article about Libyan intervention

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Persecution of Roma in Hungary

Via Harry's Place




Sunday, March 13, 2011

The newest Jewish conspiracies in the Arab Street

Israel assists Qaddafi

Israel attempts to thwart Amr Moussa's presidential bid:


How better to win the hearts and minds of freedom-loving Egyptians than to accuse Israel of trying to stop Moussa's candidacy? All that remains is for some wikileaks leaks to provide the secret minutes of an Israeli cabinet meeting instructing the Mossad to torpedo Moussa's chances, and Mousa becomes a national hero. Who will dare not vote for him?

Wave of uprisings in the Arab street orchestrated by Tel Aviv

Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh addressed about 500 students and lecturers at Sanaa University on Tuesday, where he claimed that protests had been orchestrated by Tel Aviv, under the direction of Washington DC.

A Zionist Olympic logo




@ the Egyptian blog "Pyramidion" a few more conspiracies are provided:

After being internationally recognized as a new nation amidst Arab countries in 1948 and in order to serve its aggressive and expansionist policy in Palestine, Israel needed time-more than anything else- to make those new Zionist geo-political findings as facts on the ground and nothing seemed to serve those end goals better than ever new Israeli aggressions, strong and blind support from the united states and backstage deals with authoritarian and corrupt Arab rulers, whom while trying to guarantee their grip on power, were willing to give Israel more than she even asked for.

Arab rulers gave Israel the long peace and quiet on the Egyptian and Jordanian borders, they gave her the normalization of political relations with Tel Aviv offered by many capitols in the Arab world from Doha/Qatar in the east to Rabat/Morocco in the far west and even some of the corrupt negotiators of the Palestinian authority have offered to give Israel unbelievable concessions regarding the hot topics of the west bank and East Jerusalem thus denying millions of Palestinians the right to return to their homeland as revealed lately by the Palestine papers leaked by Aljazeera. "


"you are truely tuned into the egyption “uprising”, you’d see that this was a CIA-Mossad operation punishing Mubarek for his failure to support an attack on Iran. Your cry for a unified arab people is precisely what hillary clinton , et al. sought in order to create their “nuclear umbrella” in order to “protect” the arab peoples (Egypt, Saudi Arbia, etc) and poor little Israel from “evil” Iran. Instead, as everyone understands, this would have been used to launch an attack on that nation. Your petition for pan-arabism is just a ploy to pit sunnis against shiites. If not, take a look at the facts and reconsider."

Gaza Celebrates

This and this (graphical gore, be warned)


These photos are all of the same person passing around a plate of pastry in the street, not a mass celebration. However, Hamas has officially praised the murder.

Update II:

A little belatedly, I remembered these final lines from
Caryl Churchill's Seven Jewish Children


I wonder what Churchill feels these days.

Thursday, March 10, 2011

Racists, Anti-Racists, Anti-Zionists and Antisemites

An interesting and at times rather vitriolic discussion has developed on a TNR thread (5) (6) in which this statement by Marty Peretz

"It is clear to me that Obama hasn't the faintest idea of what's going on in the AfPak region, and is in strategic rescue mode by his commanders who grasp what he cannot. Or refuses to."

was interpreted by one poster to imply the following meaning:

"Poor little nigger boy become prez; he needs to be saved by white generals."

I disagreed (in my contentious way) with the interpretation and much commentary followed, all of which I found unpersuasive. While I have my own opinion about Peretz's sporadic inclination towards making politically incorrect statements, I have never regarded him as even remotely favouring the type of raw and naked racism that this interpretation implies and consider it a straightforward slander.

2. Another discussion concerning the exact algorithms of an antisemitic expression/sentiment developed on Bob's blog,


I particularly liked this comment as it laid bare the antisemitic/anti-Zionist dialectic in novel and sharp clarity.

3. Commercial break

4. Anne Frank and discarded Jewish identities

5. Intervention in Libya? (Fact is, I don't know what to think)


In re-reading some of the stuff that gets revealed in Bob's threads about the Left's relationship with antisemitism, and the TNR thread about whether Peretz, a liberal devotedly pro-Israel journalist, is a rabid racist at heart, I get the impression that what I'm seeing are symptoms of a much deeper and troubling phenomenon. I get the impression that in spite of the clarity and undeniability of facts, they no longer matter. Passions, prejudices, perverted and contorted arguments are presented, in attempts to excuse or dismiss in the one case and to indict and condemn in the other.

These lines,

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."

have never seemed more pertinent .

But what is that passion about? What exactly is the source? How come people who are perfectly lucid and intelligent when someone tries to explain to them certain aspects in Quantum Mechanics, seem to be overcome with a singular inability to discern fact from fiction, seem to want to look for monsters where none exist? As if the simple rules of rational thinking, presentation of evidence, making cogent arguments that would make sense even when you don't agree with them, all these are no longer considered necessary. It is enough that I feel something to justify a campaign of prosecution, if not downright demonization.

"A mathematician once said that algebra was the science for lazy people-- one does not work out x, but operates with it as if one knew it... Politics means operating with this x without worrying about its actual nature. Making history is to recognize x for what it stands for in the equation.” (Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon)

Is this where I might begin to understand, with trying to find this x, what it is, what role it plays, what premise underlies it, in the discussions (and others) I referred to ?

There is of course a political utility to accusing someone, especially a journalist, of racism. It takes away a person's moral authority. It yields double the profit when the accused is a Jewish journalist, and a triple dividend when he is a pro-Israeli Jewish journalist. A racist cannot and should not be believed when he points to antisemitic occurrences or, God forbid, that he should claim that some type of criticism against Israel is in fact concealed antisemitism. The tactic works like the weakening of a body's immune system, just waiting for it to be invaded with an infectious agent. It's rendering the target morally indefensible. It's like manufacturing defencelessness.

Concurrently, there is a persistent, consistent and insistent denial --in places where one expects to find moral authority, such as academia, media, Left-wing organizations like NGO's, or green parties or what have you-- that antisemitism is a legitimate grievance, a very present and growing phenomenon.

In effect, what we have is an attempt to fight what is perceived as paranoia by a counter paranoia. Thus, the claim of antisemitism is often dismissed as the collective fantasies of a damaged psyche (the Jews), while the same are being pilloried for being racists (mostly they are accused of being Islamophobes, or just plain racists).

So a person can be slandered but, due to his "record" as a racist, he has no defense against such vile imputations. He can explain or deny, try to prove, provide the necessary evidence, the words, the context, the arguments -- all of which he can do, of course. But who will listen, once that person has been maligned, except those who had never believed or accepted any of it, anyway?

And so it goes ...

Saturday, March 05, 2011

Sabra Hummus

Why is Angry Arab calling for the boycotting of Sabra Hummus?

He is not saying.

Can one conjecture, then, that it might have something to do with the name, or the Kosher label, or the list of its managers?

A mystery.


@ Engage:


on my sitemeter:

"London, United Kingdom, 0 returning visits

5th March 201109:38:10Page ViewNo referring link
5th March 201110:05:22Exit Link
5th March 201110:22:19Page ViewNo referring link


Either way, a mature and well-considered reaction. )


From "Truth"'s link:






About Rachel Corrie and her legacy:

