elitist waste of space and newsprint

We’re not celebrating Israel’s anniversary
Letters, Guardian, Wednesday, April 30

In May, Jewish organisations will be celebrating the 60th anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel. This is understandable in the context of centuries of persecution culminating in the Holocaust. Nevertheless, we are Jews who will not be celebrating. Surely it is now time to acknowledge the narrative of the other, the price paid by another people for European anti-semitism and Hitler’s genocidal policies. As Edward Said emphasised, what the Holocaust is to the Jews, the Naqba is to the Palestinians. In April 1948, the same month as the infamous massacre at Deir Yassin and the mortar attack on Palestinian civilians in Haifa’s market square, Plan Dalet was put into operation. This authorised the destruction of Palestinian villages and the expulsion of the indigenous population outside the borders of the state. We will not be celebrating. In July 1948, 70,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes in Lydda and Ramleh in the heat of the summer with no food or water. Hundreds died. It was known as the Death March. We will not be celebrating. In all, 750,000 Palestinians became refugees. Some 400 villages were wiped off the map. That did not end the ethnic cleansing. Thousands of Palestinians (Israeli citizens) were expelled from the Galilee in 1956. Many thousands more when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza. Under international law and sanctioned by UN resolution 194, refugees from war have a right to return or compensation. Israel has never accepted that right. We will not be celebrating. We cannot celebrate the birthday of a state founded on terrorism, massacres and the dispossession of another people from their land. We cannot celebrate the birthday of a state that even now engages in ethnic cleansing, that violates international law, that is inflicting a monstrous collective punishment on the civilian population of Gaza and that continues to deny to Palestinians their human rights and national aspirations. We will celebrate when Arab and Jew live as equals in a peaceful Middle East.

Signed, Seymour Alexander, Ruth Appleton, Steve Arloff, Rica Bird, Jo Bird, Cllr Jonathan Bloch, Ilse Boas, Prof. Haim Bresheeth, Tanya Bronstein, Sheila Colman, Ruth Clark, Sylvia Cohen, Judith Cravitz, Mike Cushman, Angela Dale, Ivor Dembina, Dr. Linda Edmondson, Nancy Elan, Liz Elkind, Pia Feig, Colin Fine, Deborah Fink, Sylvia Finzi, Brian Fisher MBE, Frank Fisher, Bella Freud, Catherine Fried, Uri Fruchtmann, Stephen Fry, David Garfinkel, Carolyn Gelenter, Claire Glasman, Tony Greenstein, Heinz Grunewald, Michael Halpern, Abe Hayeem, Rosamine Hayeem, Anna Hellman, Amy Hordes, Joan Horrocks, Deborah Hyams, Selma James, Riva Joffe, Yael Oren Kahn, Michael Kalmanovitz, Paul Kaufman, Prof. Adah Kay, Yehudit Keshet, Prof. Eleonore Kofman, Rene Krayer, Stevie Krayer, Berry Kreel, Leah Levane, Les Levidow, Peter Levin, Louis Levy, Ros Levy, Prof. Yosefa Loshitzky, Catherine Lyons, Deborah Maccoby, Daniel Machover, Prof. Emeritus Moshe Machover, Miriam Margolyes OBE, Mike Marqusee, Laura Miller, Simon Natas, Hilda Meers, Martine Miel, Laura Miller, Arthur Neslen, Diana Neslen, Orna Neumann, Harold Pinter, Roland Rance, Frances Rivkin, Sheila Robin, Dr. Brian Robinson, Neil Rogall, Prof. Steven Rose, Mike Rosen, Prof. Jonathan Rosenhead, Leon Rosselson, Michael Sackin, Sabby Sagall, Ian Saville, Alexei Sayle, Anna Schuman, Sidney Schuman, Monika Schwartz, Amanda Sebestyen, Sam Semoff, Linda Shampan, Sybil Shine, Prof. Frances Stewart, Inbar Tamari, Ruth Tenne, Martin Toch, Tirza Waisel, Stanley Walinets, Martin White, Ruth Williams, Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, Devra Wiseman, Gerry Wolff, Sherry Yanowitz.

(It was even more of a waste of space and newsprint when all these self-important twats were listed in single vertical column in bold print. I’m English, I know these people. They are very comfortably off, genuine examples of latte-sipping Hamstead Village socialism (Hampstead is a perpetually trendy upper middle class inner suburb of London) posing as the conscience of the Anglo-Jewish community, which understands them perfectly and makes sure they get their annual ration of honours, titles, professoriates, knighthoods and damehoods from the British state. It’s a token gesture. If they really gave a damn, they wouldn’t have sent their letter to the so-called “Guardian,” they would have sent it to “The Independent”—especially since Johann Hari put his entire journalistic career on the line there four days ago, by writing an article about the Territories of a frankness that you will NEVER see in the sold-out cynical Guardian. Another thing about Harold Pinter. When I was at a demonstration in Trafalgar Square in 2006, against Israel’s genocidal attack on Lebanon, which was heavily attended by Muslims, including a number of women wearing hujub, Pinter did not bother to turn up, but sent a “poem” to be read on his behalf, which was so obscene—I mean really, deliberately, disgustingly obscene—that the entire Muslim community in attendance was visibly embarrassed and humiliated, but no one dared to say a word against it, either then or afterwards. This is absolutely typical of the anglo-jewish left—so much so that I think it is deliberate, like the trade-off between support for Muslims and support for “gay rights activists.” – RB)

love is in the air again

The definition of “the Jewish people” is still rabbinical, as a result of the conditions of Jewish existence in the Diaspora, where “the Jewish people” were not defined as a “nation” but as a religious body. Self-definition as a “nation” would have raised problems of loyalty to the states within which they lived, whereas self-definition as a religious community was a diplomatically sensible adaptation. However, zionism is quite precisely the reconstruction of “the Jewish people” as a “nation” – but, a compromise was made by zionist leaderships with the rabbinates, so that now one can only “become a Jew” by conversion. I myself would like to “become a Jew,” but I am not prepared to surrender my freedom of thought to the rabbinate, any more that most Jews-by-birth in fact are. Perhaps if Shelhevet, who sounds awfully nice, were to marry me, we could blackmail the rabbis into “converting” me pro forma! Then I could come and live in Israel, and help humanise the place!

Another comment by moi to Johann Hari, Independent

my contribution to holocaust day

Sirens wail as Israel marks Holocaust Remembrance Day
Haaretz

Talkback
Title: This is so paradoxical Name: Rowan City: London State: England
It is your residual ability to judge yourselves that gives the rest of us hope. There is very, very, little time left, I fancy. Very little chance, very little hope. Please don`t make us write you off for good. For the sake of all the Israelis whose fault all this is NOT, please. Neither I nor anyone else will put our hearts on the line for you forever. You know that. You also know I want to help you. And finally, in case anyone reaches for the old canard, I am not a christian, a muslim, a buddhist, or anything else. I do not want to “convert” you to anything. And if I could find a way to become a Jew without “converting to (religious) Judaism” I would do that, gladly. Don`t make me say this again. Please. It`s too painful and humiliating.

a referee reverie

I have noticed that the Soros Open Society Institute runs a system of project grants for all sorts of people, including not just professionals or academics but also the usefully vague “activists,” and I have been trying to fill out a project application explaining my half-completed hebrew studies, my desire to talk to large numbers of (especially younger) israelis in depth, and produce a sort of pop sociology, of the sort that in the 1960s famously helped explain youth culture to the middle-aged.

It says I need three referees – not academics or specialists, since my project makes no claims of that sort, but just referees, generally. In practice, referees with professional status in related areas would be best.

me and my personal plans, again

There is no obvious market for my current skills, such as they are : rudimentary Hebrew, and a certain passion for Israel. I am, of course, not Jewish by birth, and I do not desire conversion to Judaism on a religious basis. I don’t deny it could happen ex post facto, by which I mean, after an integration in everyday terms into Jewish Israeli life. I try to make it clear that I care about Israel and its inhabitants, and that I would like to be one of them, and indeed I would like to “be a Jew” to the extent that the English “are C-of-E.” I’m not being funny here, I am quite serious : the merit of the “C-of-E” is that the average English person belongs to it by default, says so on passport applications and such, but feels no requirement to darken the doors of his parish church except maybe for the occasional wedding, birth celebration, or funeral. Nor do I mean that I am disinterested in the Jewish religion : I am extremely interested in it, but not as a “believer” in it, or in anything else. Fundamentally, as is normal for people brought up in modern conditions, I regard religion as a sort of cultural backdrop, no more than that. To delve deeply into the implications of Jewish kabbalah, for instance, I would probably use some sort of psychoanalytic framework of analysis, not the mindless appeal to “revelation” as such.

rowan goes job hunting

For at least ten years I have been listening to Israeli radio, first via short-wave and subsequently via the Internet, and I also have a lot of Israeli LPs. The thing is, if you want to learn Hebrew without wanting to convert to Judaism, it’s rather hard to find teachers. The last one I had tried so hard to treat me as a would-be convert that I ended up sending her a set of emails so sulphurous that they may yet land me up in court. Luckily, I have found a means of learning modern colloquial Hebrew that does not require the goodwill of the local Jewish community – a set of CDs of audio lessons originally made by the US State Dept. for the families of employees posted there, which along with a few decent grammars and dictionaries will do the job. Coincidentally, my government has just determined that despite a mild back injury I should try to earn my own living, so I am trying to appeal to people who might employ me full-time in some capacity that could allow me to pursue English-Hebrew bilinguality, either physically here in London, or generally, via the Web. I have a very high opinion of the value of translation from both the Hebrew press and Hebrew literature. As a non-Jew I am probably quite unusual in wanting to speak modern Hebrew, anyway, simply because I like the language.

the british chief rabbinate and why I don’t like it

Really, to understand the role the British Chief Rabbinate sees itself as having in British society, the best comparison I can think of is the Association of Headmasters of Public Schools. They share the same nineteenth-century British imperialism, totally sincerely too—the Chief Rabbinate cannot be accused of treachery to Britain, quite the reverse. Like the neocons in the USA, they are plus royaliste que le roi.

When looking at the office of the Chief Rabbinate, it is not relevant to talk about ‘left versus right’ in the usual sense, any more than it would be in relation to the Association of Headmasters of Public Schools, or the House of Bishops. An important attitude found in the supposedly ‘progressive’ public schools, that even from a ‘progressive’ point of view, British imperialism is a must, preferably in its nineteenth-century form, where we have the Gatling guns and the natives have not, explains this. Thus, the Anglo-Jewish élite can legitimately cover the entire conventional political spectrum, just as the non-Jewish scions of the public schools, or the Bishops, do—but the nominally ‘left’ or ‘progressive’ end of their spectrum is just as devoted to hard-line British imperialism as the nominally ‘right’ or ‘reactionary’ end of their spectrum. Once one begins to develop a sense for these ‘hardened networks,’ one also senses how closely inter-related they all are, and how they collectively reinforce the myth of the sacral British-Israel Imperium.

The only way to deal with all this is to examine the way in which the Jewish cultural superego maps onto the non-Jewish cultural superego, and it seems to me that it is the Hebrew language itself, with its echoes of infantile omnipotence and terror, derived mainly from the sonorous and usually mispronounced Hebrew proper names heard during childhood Bible study, which provides the psychological vehicle for this mapping. An effect of the monopolistic Rabbinical control over Hebrew language education is what I might call “the Harry Potterisation of the universe”—a phenomenon that infantilises adults, and explains why they join Freemasonry.

There are evident national security implications for any country that allows the Rabbinate to create a situation where no one teaches the Hebrew language without a Rabbinical hechsher (seal of approval)—the intelligence implications are staggering, actually. After WW2 Churchill set up a Central European Committee, with the aim of forming an “anti-Russian Confederation” of Central European nations, intended to give Britain total domination of Central Europe. MI6, supported by French intelligence and the Vatican, recruited Central and East European émigrés, MI5 established Masonic lodges among the exiles, and networks were set up in France, Italy, Germany, Austria, and elsewhere, providing the basis for Intermarium, Prometheus, NTS, Gladio, etc. It can hardly be doubted that the Israeli Masonic Lodges (at least, those which cater to English speakers) are closely related to these networks.

My own position is that I dearly love Jewish Israeli street culture, and especially Jewish Israeli rock music, of which I have a lot. This is not the sort of attitude the Chief Rabbinate looks for in Hebrew students, but it has allowed me to drag into the open the interesting fact that even the language itself is being treated as their own private property. These Chief Rabbinate people are taking advantage of the colonial style of government over their own people that the British establishment itself admires so much—but I refuse to let them prevent me from talking to Israelis in their own tongue.

obama’s race-neutral strategy unravels

from Glen Ford, Black Agenda Report (extracts)

Barack Obama’s strategy to win the White House was to run a “race-neutral” campaign in a society that is anything but neutral on race. The very premise—that race neutrality is possible in a nation built on white supremacy—demanded the systematic practice of the most profound race-factual denial, which is ultimately indistinguishable from rank dishonesty. From the moment Obama told the 2004 Democratic National Convention that “there is no white America, there is no black America,” it was inevitable that the candidate would one day declare the vast body of black opinion illegitimate. That day came on Tuesday, April 29, when a battered and truly bitter Barack Obama made his final, irrevocable break with his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose televised Black Liberation Theology tour de force the preceding Friday, Sunday and Monday had laid bare the contradictions of Obama’s hopeless racial “neutrality.” It was the masterful preacher and seasoned political creature Wright—not the racists who had endlessly looped chopped snippets of the reverend’s past sermons together in an attempt to make him appear crazed—who forced Obama to choose in the push and pull of black and white American worldviews. Obama was made to register his preference for the white racist version of truth over Rev. Wright’s, whose rejection of Euro-American mythology reflects prevailing African American perceptions, past and present.

Obama was less than eloquent. “All it was is a bunch of rants that aren’t grounded in truth,” said Sen. Obama, low-rating Rev. Wright’s remarks at the National Press Club, in Washington, the morning before. Rev. Wright had become a “caricature” of himself, said the wounded candidate—another way of calling the minister a clown. Under questioning from reporters in Winston Salem, North Carolina, Obama swore up and down that he had never before, in 16 years as a member of Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ congregation, observed his pastor behave in such a way. The declaration rang patently false, as even a red-state Republican white evangelical observer would have recognized Wright’s Press Club performance as that of veteran pulpit-master with a vast repertoire of church-pleasing moves and grooves to draw upon, all of them honed over decades for the entertainment of his parishioners—including Obama. But the senator was intent on giving the impression that Rev. Wright was—unbeknownst to Obama—a Jekyll and Hyde character, whose statements “were not only divisive and destructive, but I believe that they end up giving comfort to those who prey on hate.” An amazingly Bush-like turn of phrase! The man who married Barack and Michelle and baptized their children is now rhetorically linked to Osama bin Laden or the Ku Klux Klan.

Clearly, this is what panic looks and sounds like, when Obama’s flimsy tissues of “race neutrality” are stripped away. He berates Rev. Wright and other black voices for self-centeredness in failing to strike a balance between African American grievances and whatever ails white people. “When you start focusing so much on the historically oppressed,” said Obama, “we lose sight of the plight of others.” Obama is desperate to convince these “others” that he rejects anything that smacks of an Afro-centric worldview, as represented by Rev. Wright. “What became clear to me was that he was presenting a world view that contradicts what I am and what I stand for.” Rev. Wright succeeded in drawing a line in the sand, whether that was his intention or not, daring Obama to take his stand on one side or the other. Race “neutrality”—an impossibility in the actually existing United States—went out the window, as Obama in extremis positioned himself at the political/historical fault line, alongside the defenders of the Alamo and American Manifest Destiny. As dictated by the logic of power, Obama furiously maneuvered toward “white space,” shamelessly taking cover in a kind of populist white patriotism that has always branded black grievances as selfish, even dangerous distractions from the larger national mission. Rev. Wright’s “rantings” amounted to “a complete disregard for what the American people are going through,” said Obama. “What mattered to him was him commanding center stage.”

Obama had belabored the same theme in his Philadelphia speech on race, a few weeks earlier—a widely applauded piece of oratory that was at root an exercise in moral equivalence that equated white and Black grievances in the US, as if history and gross power discrepancies did not exist. Obama is as quick as any smug corporate commentator to dismiss as the ravings of extremists and those who “prey on hate” the very idea that US imperialism is an historical and current fact. Chickens cannot possibly come home to roost in terroristic revenge as a response to American crimes against humanity, since “good” nations by definition are incapable of such crimes. It is beyond the pale to contemplate that the United States has Dr. Deaths on its covert payrolls dealing in ghastly biological warfare—the AIDS genesis theory.

In order for his race-neutral strategy to appear sane, Obama must constantly paint a picture of an America that does not exist. This cannot be accomplished without mangling the truth, assaulting the truth-tellers, and misrepresenting America’s past and present. Since Obama’s candidacy is predicated on minimizing the pervasiveness of racism in American life, it is necessary that he cast doubt on the legitimacy of those with race-based grievances. Otherwise, he would be morally compelled to abandon his neutrality and side with the oppressed minority. Thus, he announces in Selma, Alabama that Blacks “have already come 90 percent of the way” to equality—a non-truth by virtually any measurement. He says the “incompetence was color-blind” in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, thereby deracializing all that occurred in New Orleans from the moment the winds died down to this very second. He claims that 1980s Ronald Reagan voters had understandable grievances due to “the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s,” in the process cleansing the Reagan victory of any racist content. Race neutrality requires that Barack Obama become a cleanup boy for racists, historically and in the present day. At the same time, Obama is driven to loathe most those people and facts that might lead to divisiveness. America’s worst enemies are not the racists, but those who point out the facts of racism, as Obama explained in mid-March in Philadelphia:

Reverend Wright’s comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems—two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.

Rev. Wright and his ilk, by this reasoning, are Public Enemy Number One, standing in the way of the racial harmony that is the natural order of things in Obama’s mythical America. Ironically, in practice, race-neutrality also requires that Obama disarm himself in the face of racist attacks. “If I lose,” he told reporters with a straight face, “it would not be because of race. It would be because of mistakes I made along the campaign trail.” Institutional racism is alien to Barack Obama’s version of the nation, a fantasy place where racial oppression has never been so endemic to the political culture as to overshadow the “promise” of America. In Obama’s public vision, his Democratic caucus victory in 98 percent white Iowa, which began the cascade of Obama wins, proves that the US is ready for profound racial “change.” Left unnoted is the fact that Iowa incarcerates African Americans at 13 times the frequency that it locks up whites, the worst record in the nation.

For people like Rev. Jeremiah Wright, mass black incarceration and slavery are seamlessly linked, part of the continuity of racial oppression in the US. Most African Americans see the world the way Rev. Wright does—that’s why he’s among the five top rated preacher-speakers in black America. This black American world view, excruciatingly aware of the nation’s origins in genocide and slavery, is wholly incompatible with the American mythology championed by Barack Obama. When the two meet, they are mutually repellent. The relationship between Rev. Wright and Sen. Obama has undergone “great damage,” says Obama, understatedly. But the break was inevitable and is no tragedy, because it reveals the incompatibility of Obama’s adapted world view with the body of knowledge amassed by African Americans since before the landing of the Mayflower. The truth is always a revelation.

motormouth rowan comments again

The claim that a region described a few sentences earlier as “desperately poor, undereducated and underdeveloped, with a per-capita income of less than seventy cents per day” contains a mystery master-terrorist who is “using the Pakistani safe haven to put the last element necessary to launch another attack against America into place” is no more plausible than any of the other claims the USA has used to attack defenseless starving third world populations almost all over the world. The real reason for this agitation is that, thanks to its incompetent and traitor-ridden “counter-proliferation policy,” the USA has now lost all influence over the nuclear weapons policy of Pakistan, and so the USA is trying to concoct a suitably James Bond style pretext for invading Pakistan, bit by bit. The Pakistanis, incidentally, know this, and even say it, in their own press. One can only thank one’s lucky stars that the dollar is collapsing at an ever-increasing rate.

– My comment to
“al Qaeda Readies in Pakistan,” WaPo-Newsweek-PostGlobal

The GAO Report is here (pdf, 37pp.)