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Way back in January 2008, I referred to “Barack Obama’s Zbig problem” — Zbigniew Brzezinski, that is. Zbig was never a friend of Israel, and I was more than a little bothered by the suggestion that he would be a key foreign policy adviser for candidate Obama.

After quoting some of Brzezinski’s more egregiously anti-Israel remarks, I wrote,

Brzezinski supports the pernicious, even anti-Semitic Mearsheimer and Walt, he accuses Israel of ignoring collateral damage and in effect committing war crimes in Lebanon, he perpetuates the false and dangerous accusation that Israel is in some sense responsible for the US being in Iraq, and — time and again — he declares a moral equivalence between Israel and her terrorist opponents — Hamas and Arafat…

We don’t need another James A. Baker in a critical position in a future Obama administration. Obama has received criticism from pro-Israel voices like Alan Dershowitz about Brzezinski. The Obama campaign has responded that the criticism is politically motivated and coming from supporters of Hillary Clinton. Regardless, Brzezinski’s slant is clear from his own words.

Well, Zbig does not have an official position in the Obama administration, but there is no question that his voice is taken seriously.

And what he is saying is obscene. This is from an interview in the Daily Beast (thanks to Michael Goldfarb for noticing it and Dan Friedman for bringing it to my attention):

How aggressive can Obama be in insisting to the Israelis that a military strike might be in America’s worst interest?
We are not exactly impotent little babies. They have to fly over our airspace in Iraq. Are we just going to sit there and watch?

What if they fly over anyway?
Well, we have to be serious about denying them that right. That means a denial where you aren’t just saying it. If they fly over, you go up and confront them. They have the choice of turning back or not. No one wishes for this but it could be a Liberty in reverse.

“A Liberty in reverse”?

Just a couple of words about the USS Liberty:

The facts are that Israeli planes attacked the US naval vessel in the Mediterranean in 1967, killing 34 and wounding 171. Israel said it was a mistake caused by a series of errors and that the ship was thought to be Egyptian. The government apologized and paid compensation for the crew members who were killed and injured, as well as for the damage to the ship. The US officially accepted the Israeli explanation of the incident and the apology.

But those are just the facts. The reality is that there is a huge controversy, with survivors of the crew and others firmly convinced that the attack was deliberate, and that the US and Israel conspired to cover up the truth (a good presentation of the case that the attack was a tragic error can be found in “The Liberty Incident” by A. Jay Cristol).

The ugly part is that Jews and conspiracies go together. Every neo-Nazi website gleefully presents the theory as proof that the US really is ZOG (Zionist Occupied Government) territory. The Liberty incident is on every antisemite and anti-Zionist’s list of reasons for hating Israel and the perfidious Jews.

Including Zbiggy’s.

So not only is this mamzer advocating that the United States of America shoot at aircraft of its ally, Israel — in order to protect the nuclear weapons capability of its enemy, Iran — but he is doing so in terms which evoke the darkest impulses in his American audience.

Technorati Tags: Brzezinski, USS Liberty, Israel, Iran

Max Blumenthal has another Youtube hit. This time in addition to the drunks of his previous video, he gets some young Israelis — whose command of English is not all that great, and who live in a country where the taboos of political correctness are not so entrenched  — to say unattractive things, which he gleefully splices together.

He asked a few apparently inebriated young men about the ‘Iranian people’, getting one to say “I hate them”. I am absolutely certain that the victim was thinking about the Iranian regime, but when you are drunk and speak English on a 3-year-old level it’s hard to be precise.  Blumenthal  also falsely implied that the so-called “nakba law” has been passed, “making it a crime to talk about destroyed Arab villages”.

Then he found some Israeli Arab students (with better English) who talked about how they are discriminated against, having their ID’s checked just because they were Arab.

The thing is, this is so easy — imagine what he could do in any American college town, or among the Palestinians. The reporter sometimes even puts words in people’s mouths, as if it’s necessary.

What has Blumenthal done? He’s put together bits and pieces of video showing Jews in as ugly a light as possible. Imagine if he’d done the same for African Americans or Muslims! There is a word for this — antisemitism — and it is not a defense to claim that you are Jewish.

There are other words, too, like cheap shots, lack of context, yellow journalism, propaganda and just plain dishonesty.

Blumenthal would undoubtedly say that is is only anti-Zionist. But his video speaks for itself.

Max Blumenthal, the son of former President Clinton’s aide Sidney Blumenthal, was born in 1977. I’m sure that he went to an excellent university here in the US, unlike my own son who was born in the same year and who spent the same part of his youth in the dust and flies of South Lebanon trying to avoid Hezbollah’s mortar shells.

Unlike the Israelis that he made fools of, Blumenthal lives in a big country which does not have 60,000 missiles aimed at it (from Lebanon and Syria), which can hit any part of it. He does not live a few miles from a seething nest of violent hatred which from time to time randomly vomits rockets into his town, as many Israelis do. He does not live in range of a country ruled by a fanatical despot that will soon have nuclear bombs and has threatened repeatedly to annihilate his nation.

Blumenthal exemplifies the uninformed, privileged American Jews who hate Israel. Maybe it will take the shit hitting the fan for Jews in the US — after all, history shows that at some point it happens in every diaspora culture — for them to understand.

Technorati Tags: Max Blumenthal, Israel

Racially and ethnically based hatred is universally excoriated today. Even the worst Israel-haters often try their best to distance themselves from antisemitism. For example, here’s a statement from Ben White, a British author and journalist (h/t, Jonny Paul):

I do not consider myself an anti-Semite, yet I can also understand why some are. There are, in fact, a number of reasons. One is the state of Israel, its ideology of racial supremacy and its subsequent crimes committed against the Palestinians. It is because Zionists have always sought to equate their colonial project with Judaism that some misguidedly respond to what they see on their televisions with attacks on Jews or Jewish property.

One of his other reasons is “the widespread bias and subservience to the Israeli cause in the Western media”. Funny, I hadn’t noticed that — particularly in the British media. Have you?

White has written a book with the clever title “Israel Apartheid: A Beginner’s Guide“. Although I haven’t read it, I presume its purpose is to help newbies get started in the hating game. I’d prefer “Israel hatred for the complete idiot” which has the advantage of spelling out the true nature of its audience in the title.

The book is published by Pluto Press, which also publishes political works by Noam Chomsky, Joel Kovel, Mazin Qumsiyeh, Israel Shahak, Jeff Halper, Edward Said, and other anti-Israel superstars. Pluto Press was recently under fire from Jewish groups for publishing a particularly offensive book by Kovel.

White himself is a professional hater.  His blog is a primer on anti-Israel talking points. For example, an article he wrote during the Gaza war is called “Israel wanted a humanitarian crisis” and repeats every lie, exaggeration and context-free fact he could find in support of his hateful contention that the whole aim of the war was to “deliberately target… Palestinian civilians and the very infrastructure of normal life, in order to – in the best colonial style – teach the natives a lesson.”

Nice. A perfect example of how to use what I call the Four Tools of Delegitimization. But why I mention this undistinguished example in a sea of similar examples is that it’s clear that for him and many others Israel-hating meets a need for which there are few acceptable outlets.  If he were writing before WWII, or even today if he were living in Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, etc. he could simply come out as a Jew-hater. But in today’s Western society — as yet, anyway — that’s not an option for a ‘respectable’ intellectual (or even an auto racing official).

The degree of  passion exhibited by the Ben Whites of the world, the way they zero in on this particular cause when there are so many worthy ones, and the sheer negativity of their energy — read a few of White’s posts and note how they are so much more about hating Israel than about caring for Palestinians — show us that there is something very special about this issue and its devotees.

Although I could argue that extreme Israel-hatred is either identical with or grounded in antisemitism, I would prefer to suggest that hating a nation is no better than hating a race or an ethnic group, and should be condemned with equal vehemence.

As for White, he’s a young man (BA, Cambridge, 2005). He should ask himself if a career in hate is really what he wants in the long run.

Technorati Tags: Ben White, Israel hatred, antisemitism

Still not convinced that Iran must be prevented — by any means necessary — from becoming a nuclear power?

Watch as a member of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s entourage abuses Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel:

Words are not an adequate response to the gutter trash that is Ahmadinejad and his cohorts. And Ahmadinejad is not the only one. The same sewer rhetoric — or worse — can be heard in the mouths of Palestinians of both the Hamas and Fatah varieties, and even from ‘progressive’ activists here in California.

Ahmadinejad has done us a favor by showing the world that antisemitism is real, Jews are not ‘obsessed with the Holocaust’, and it’s not just ‘Jewish paranoia’. They do hate us and want to wipe us out.

The Zionist idea that a Jewish state can prevent another Holocaust is about to be tested as severely as it has ever been since the end of WWII. Another Zionist idea, whose truth was firmly established then, is that the Jewish people needs to defend itself — nobody, not the US, not any other nation or international organization, will do it for them.

I’m confident that Israel will defend herself and the Jewish people yet again, and Ahmadinejad’s place in history will be assured — not as the destroyer of Israel he aspires to be, but rather as one who brought catastrophe onto his own people.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Iran, Ahmadinejad, antisemitism, anti-Semitism