Glenn Greenwald

Wednesday July 2, 2008 05:49 EDT

The right's game-playing with "dual loyalty" and "anti-Semitism" accusations

(updated below - Update II)

As our political establishment takes new and disturbing steps towards a more confrontational approach with Iran, the effort to stomp out any discussion of the role Israel plays in that policy has once again intensified. Last week, Joe Klein -- basically out of the blue -- observed that while many advocates of an attack on Iraq (which once included Klein) were motivated by "neocolonial" fantasies or ensuring access to Iraq's oil, many other war proponents were motivated by their allegiance to Israel:

The fact that a great many Jewish neoconservatives -- people like Joe Lieberman and the crowd over at Commentary -- plumped for this war, and now for an even more foolish assault on Iran, raised the question of divided loyalties: using U.S. military power, U.S. lives and money, to make the world safe for Israel.

Since then, Klein has escalated the provocative rhetoric, writing several days ago:

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SIMON WIESENTHAL CENTER DENOUNCES LEADERSHIP OF THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

FOR WITHDRAWING STATEMENT ON ANTISEMITISM

Source: SWC

Published: June 24, 2008 Author:

SIMON WIESENTHAL CENTER DENOUNCES LEADERSHIP OF THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH (USA) FOR WITHDRAWING STATEMENT ON ANTISEMITISM

Center officials also urge PCUSA to censure members who meet with Hezbollah and other terrorist groups

The Simon Wiesenthal Center strongly criticized the leadership of the Presbyterian Church (USA) for its betrayal of the Jewish community by rescinding a ground-breaking document that had condemned anti-Semitism just before this week’s PCUSA General Assembly in San Jose, CA.

The document, entitled “Vigilance against Anti-Jewish Ideas and Bias” was released on the PCUSA website last month and was praised by Jewish organizations, including the Wiesenthal Center, who have been alarmed at the recent number of anti-Israel proposals to Church policy. However, the document was revised to change the focus to Presbyterian responsibility in the Middle East. The new document, which added the subheading, “In Pursuit of Israeli-Palestinian Peace” deleted all references to missteps of PCUSA, labeled Israel the oppressor, and treated anti-Semitism as a side bar.

“The leadership of this church either doesn’t understand the clear and present danger of anti-Semitism, or lacks the moral fiber to take an unequivocal stand against anti-Semitism and anti-Semites despite whatever developments emanate from the ongoing Middle East dispute,” charged Rabbi Abraham Cooper associate Dean of the Center. In the past few days alone World Jewry has been shaken by new anti-Jewish violence in France where in Paris, a seventeen year-old Jew wearing a yarmulke was beaten into a coma by five youths. Additionally, intelligence reports of renewed threats of terrorist attacks by Hezbollah against Jewish houses of worship in Canada have been released. “This is a time we need our friends to stand up and be counted,” Cooper urged.

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Wiki, the Chaos Controlled

Tuesday, May 27, 2008 - By: Shamir, Israel

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Related
Norman Finkelstein deported from Israel
Are Those Who Question 9/11 Anti-Semites?


"Finkelstein insisted that Israel and its supporters conveniently label their challengers as anti-Semitic in order to “divert attention from [and] sow confusion about what the actual documentary record shows.”

***

“Every time Israel faces an international relations debacle they start up the new anti-Semitism,” he explained.

 
5/7/08

May 11th, 2008

Speaker: Dr. Norman Finkelstein

When: 5/7/08 at 8:00pm

Where: Pacific Ballroom at the UCI Student Center

:: pictures::

“You have the ability to turn things around,” Jewish-American political scientist Norman Finkelstein encouraged a stout crowd of 600 people at UC Irvine on May 7.

“Show some courage, show some backbone, stick to the facts,” Finkelstein implored the crowd, encouraging them to speak out against Israeli atrocities in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. “We have the facts on our side.”

Sponsored by the Muslim Student Union (MSU) as a part of their eighth-annual Palestine Awareness Week, Finkelstein’s visit was in hopes of answering the question: “What’s the fuss? Is Criticism of Israel Anti-Semitic?”

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Related
Settlers Do as They Please, Legally and Illegally 
True Torah Jews: Zionist 'Rabbis' Falsify Torah

The historian Tony Judt has changed our view of postwar Europe, challenged liberal America and provoked controversy with his criticism of Israel

Paul Laity 

Saturday May 17, 2008
The Guardian

Tony Judt has never fought shy of questioning long-cherished ideas. Postwar, his panoramic study of Europe after 1945, was loudly acclaimed in part because it dealt so bracingly with the lies and cover-ups on which the rebuilding of the continent depended - the number of Nazis and collaborators who retained positions of power, for instance, and the myths surrounding wartime resistance. Detail after striking detail documented how nations are never honest about their pasts, and how quickly inconvenient truths are buried.

Judt, who teaches at New York University, is known as a combative writer and reviewer, and this reputation is confirmed by his new collection of pieces, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century, which opens with the trouncing of a recent biographer of Koestler for being, among other things, priggishly obsessed with his subject's sex life. Over the years, Judt has been notable, in particular, for his acid dismissals of "romantic" communists and their fellow travellers. Many of his targets have been French intellectuals - he has ripped into Sartre numerous times - but in Reappraisals he also, from his own position on the left, accuses Eric Hobsbawm of being a "mandarin" and calls the much loved EP Thompson a "sanctimonious, priggish Little Englander".
Since September 2001, however, Judt's articulate polemicism has taken a new direction - one that has transformed his life. Uneasy about the political reaction to 9/11 in the US, he soon began to publish a series of condemnations of Bush's international policies. But whereas his anti-communism sat comfortably with mainstream liberal opinion in America, his early opposition to the Iraq war threw him out of alignment with his usual allies, who were still rallying around the president following the terrorist attacks. Judt, who was born and has spent most of his life in Britain, began to feel more aware of being European - and different. 

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by Rick Salutin

May 9, 2008

Media coverage of Israel's 60th birthday has gone on for more than a week. Almost all of it was celebratory, though there were sympathetic references to the Palestinian nakba, or catastrophe, that weren't often included in coverage of Israel's 50th or 40th. Even The National Post, among dozens of articles, had one by Jeet Heer on the "ethnic cleansing" of Palestinians, which a Post editorial rebuked the same day.

Something that struck me was the fairly narrow notion of Jewish experience outside Israel, in the Diaspora, that was implied. A Toronto prof. quoted in The Post, said: "Everything they do to us ... strengthens our deep-seated perception that fuels our identity of being a persecuted people." This rings true to me not as how things are, but as how many Canadian Jews see them. I have friends and relations, often wealthy and accomplished people, who feel anti-Semitism is always imminent, though they've rarely or never experienced it. It shapes their attitude toward Israel as the only refuge for Jews, and makes them less willing to hear criticisms of it than most Israelis are. It seems to me irrational and I wish I understood it better.

When we were kids in the 1950s, we studied a book called Sufferance is the Badge, based on Shylock's line, "Sufferance is the badge of all our tribe." It interpreted Jewish history as a tale of torment. But that was in the shadow of the Holocaust. When I was married in my 20s, my mother-in-law did a painting in her art class that showed religious Jews clutching Torah scrolls as they fled. Their beards and prayer shawls streamed behind. My father-in-law, a manufacturer, called it caustically, The Jews Running. I think he meant it was sentimentalized and overstated, and he wasn't buying that version of our past, at least not outright.

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The Christian Science Monitor

Analysts say politicians hold their tongues on giving additional US aid to Israel for fear of being labeled as anti-Semitic.

By David R. Francis

from the May 12, 2008 edition

Israel, celebrating its 60th birthday last week, has proved to be an expensive ally for the United States.
Since its birth, Israel has received at least $114 billion from the US in direct foreign economic and military aid, says Shirl McArthur, a retired US diplomat who periodically updates his Israel cost estimates for the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (WREMA), a magazine often critical of US policy toward Israel.
That estimate, Mr. McArthur notes, is conservative. For instance, he has not factored inflation into that $114 billion cumulative sum. The late Washington economist Thomas Stauffer did that calculation several years ago. He found total official aid to Israel, up to 2002, came to $247 billion. He added other costs of US support of Israel (interest on debt, higher oil prices, etc.) to reach a highly controversial total of $1.6 trillion.
For comparison, the cost to the US of the Iraq war is running about $144 billion a year.

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The witchunt is in high gear. The thought crimes bill in the US, Canada's PM declaring criticism of Israel as 'anti-semetic', Google-Bloggers' censorship(attn investors) of pro-Palestinian websites, and the list goes on. heads up the Zionists are looking to "crucify" Chtristians.

Global Thought Police Decree Passages in the New Testament Are ‘Classical Anti-Semitism’

Bible is ‘hate,’ says State Department Office of Global Anti-Semitism

By Rev. Ted Pike

The State Department “Office of Global Anti-Semitism” says the New Testament claim that the Jews had Christ crucified is “classical anti-Semitism”—a historic form of hate. It included as an “anti-Semitic incident” the case of a Polish priest who said Jews killed Christ.

Are you one of tens of millions of Christians who agree with Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ that Jewish leaders incited a Jewish mob and persuaded Pilate to have Christ crucified? The government now considers you “anti-Semitic.” You are part of a worldwide scourge the U.S., Canada, Australia, and 55 European nations are uniting to suppress.

In the many countries now ruled by hate laws, it is already a federal offense to repeat the claim of New Testament “hate literature” that the Jews had Christ crucified. The State Department’s equation of biblical Christianity with “hate” is an ominous indication. The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith—architect of hate laws worldwide (and primary ideological and statistics-gathering force behind the Office of Global Anti-Semitism)—is moving rapidly to create bias against Christians as haters, particularly of Jews and homosexuals.

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Related
Attention Editors and Writers of Alternative Media

May 8, 2008

By Israel e News Johann Hari - The Independent

In the US and Britain, there is a campaign to smear anybody who tries to describe the plight of the Palestinian people. It is an attempt to intimidate and silence – and to a large degree, it works. There is nobody these self-appointed spokesmen for Israel will not attack as anti-Jewish: liberal Jews, rabbis, even Holocaust survivors. My own case isn't especially important, but it illustrates how the wider process of intimidation works. I have worked undercover at both the Finsbury Park mosque and among neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers to expose the Jew-hatred there; when I went on the Islam Channel to challenge the anti-Semitism of Islamists, I received a rash of death threats calling me "a Jew-lover", "a Zionist-homo pig" and more. Ah, but wait. I have also reported from Gaza and the West Bank. Last week, I wrote an article that described how untreated sewage was being pumped from illegal Israeli settlements on to Palestinian land, contaminating their reservoirs. This isn't controversial. It has been documented by Friends of the Earth, and I have seen it with my own eyes. The response? There was little attempt to dispute the facts I offered. Instead, some of the most high profile "pro-Israel" writers and media monitoring groups – including Honest Reporting and Camera – said I an anti-Jewish bigot akin to Joseph Goebbels and Mahmoud Ahmadinejadh, while Melanie Phillips even linked the stabbing of two Jewish people in North London to articles like mine. Vast numbers of e-mails came flooding in calling for me to be sacked.

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