Monday, March 16, 2015

Fundamentalism and fanaticism: The ISIS-Israel connection



What can one do about a country that has gone mad? Israel has chosen the path of right-wing fanaticism, and has thus made itself the most dangerous county in the world. It is, not least, the most dangerously manipulative country in the world -- and the primary targets of this manipulation campaign are Jews living outside of Israel.

This article by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic is a despicable piece of agit-prop designed to convince Jews that they are all unsafe outside of their supposed "homeland." Jews are being told that the year is still 1944. Jews are being told that all gentiles -- every last one of them -- are ruthless, mindlessly bloodthirsty Jew-haters, reared on the Protocols and anxious to break out the Zyklon B. Anyone who opposes the Israeli plan to exterminate all Palestinians must be a Jew-hater who wants to exterminate all Jews.

The people who think this way are very sick.

Compared to (say) blacks and Muslims, Jews have attained a protected and privileged position in both the United States and Europe. Even the new fascists in Europe have become pro-Israel, a non-intuitive lesson which Mr. Brevik taught the world in such a startling fashion. Israel is hardly a safe refuge: Just look at the history of the place.

Any writer who cannot acknowledge this reality is mentally ill.

Here's an even more extreme example of this same sick mentality. A leading Israeli newspaper has called for the nuclear annihilation of Iran and Germany. 
In the opinion article published Tuesday, the author claims that only through nuclear annihilation of Iran and Germany, with 20 or 30 nuclear bombs each, can Israelis prevent the state’s destruction.

“If Israel does not walk in the ways of God’s Bible,” author Chen Ben-Eliyahu wrote in Hebrew, “it will receive a heavy punishment of near complete destruction and doom and only a few will be saved.”
Psychopathology. Mental illness.

Moreover: This is precisely the same sort of mental illness which afflicts the fanatics who join ISIS.

The sickness is called fundamentalism. The sickness is called fanaticism. And there are plenty of "Christians" walking around the United States (particularly in our southern regions) who have caught the same disease.

A recent piece by one Alan Hart (a writer previously unknown to me) hits the right note:
What Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman actually said when as leader of the right-wing Yisrael Beitenu party he addressed an election rally in Herzliya on 8 March was the following:
Whoever is with us should give everything as they wish. Whoever is against us, there’s nothing else to do. We have to lift up an axe and remove his head, otherwise we won’t survive here.
The question those words provoked in my mind was this.

If Israel continues on its present course will the future see the emergence of a Zionist equivalent of the self-styled “Islamic State“ (IS)?
Precisely. The ISIS-Israel comparison does an excellent job of demonstrating why a staunch opposition to Israel does not equate to racism or anti-Semitism.

All people of common sense and good will must confess that ISIS and Al Qaeda are monstrosities. Yet one can make this claim without making the segue into hatred of all Muslims or all Arabs.

The people bearing the brunt of the struggle against ISIS are Muslims. They are the ones who are dying to defeat the fundamentalist fanatics.

So one can hate ISIS without hating Muslims. One may express a desire to see ISIS ended forever without hating Muslims as a whole.

Similarly, one can hate Israel without hating Judaism. One may express a desire to see Israel as presently constituted ended forever without hating Jews as a whole.

What do I mean by "as presently constituted"? Let's return to Hart's piece.
Because a two-state solution in the shape and form the Palestinians could accept has long been dead, killed by Israel’s colonisation of the occupied West Bank, an enterprise best described as ongoing ethnic cleansing slowly and by stealth, a binational state is the only hope for a political resolution of the conflict.

The creation of a binational state would put under one territorial roof the land of Israel prior to the 1967 war, the occupied West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip.

In theory and principle, a real and true binational state would be one in which all of its citizens enjoyed equal political and all other civil and human rights.

Because the day is approaching when the Arabs of Israel-Palestine will outnumber the Jews, the creation of a binational state would therefore lead to the de-Zionisation of Palestine and, to quote Meir Dagan again, “the end of the Zionist dream”.
This is my position.

This "one state" outcome may seem unthinkable today -- but when I was young, the end of apartheid in South Africa and the reunification of Germany seemed to be impossible goals. (I'm of two minds about the latter...!)

The "one state" solution which I favor is not the position of many notable critics of Israel, such as Norman Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky. I revere both men. But times are changing, and they are not changing with them.

If Norman Finkelstein continues to hold on to the unrealizable fantasy of a two-state solution, the time may come when we must regretfully say: "Mr. Finkelstein, we appreciate and applaud your writings and lectures. You have done the world a remarkable service. But your service is now at an end. You are dismissed."

(I have not yet heard the new Max Blumenthal lecture embedded above. But I am sure it is worth viewing.)

12 comments:

b said...

Netanyahu is claiming that "foreign powers" are interfering in the Zionist election campaign against him.

He can't mean Jewish interests of any description, which he wouldn't call "foreign".

Who's on the list apart from Russia and the US, probably mainly the former?

Interesting that Putin 'disappeared' for 10 days.

Betting markets are predicting a Netanyahu victory. It doesn't seem to me as though he'll go quietly. Which isn't to say the Israeli Labour Party, rebranded the Zionist Union, is any better than he is.

Don't ever forget that Netanyahu was in London when the 7/7 terror attacks were carried out in 2005.

b said...

This link goes straight to the probability of a Netanyahu victory as assessed by PredictIt. Their current assessment is at 54%.

PredictIt is a political betting outfit run by Victoria University in New Zealand (with a straight face, they say it's "educational" and that they are a "not-for-profit university"), in cooperation with a US outfit called Aristotle.

Aristotle looks like the CIA to me. I can't remember whether it's been covered on this blog.

Old hands will remember DARPA's short-lived effort to set up a terrorism futures market at the Pentagon. (Talk about sick!) PredictIt's markets include North Korean nuclear tests as well as election results in various countries.

b said...

This is getting interesting. The probability of another Netanyahu presidential term as assessed by PredictIt/Aristotle has fallen to 49% as I type.

Anonymous said...

Blumenthal is a national treasure for his
stance against the Israeli monsters.

Many thanks for the video.

Anonymous said...

Blumenthal is a national treasure for his
stance against the Israeli monsters.

Many thanks for the video.

Anonymous said...

Even Bibi has publicly abandoned the two-state solution (saying out loud what everyone knows he's been thinking for years now). See http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/17/world/middleeast/benjamin-netanyahu-campaign-settlement.html What's significant here is not the policy (one that's been in de facto place for ages) than the statement, and the fact that Jodi Rudoren reported it.

Anonymous said...

The Israeli elections are being held tomorrow. The Likud party had fallen behind the moderate/liberal party in the late polls. So, there's a chance of change coming. Netanyahu's gambit with the US Congress backfired from all accounts. By tomorrow night we should know if Israel has decided to moderate the hard right position which has not served the region well.

Btw, I'm sorry to read of Bella's continuing health problems. Wish pups lived as long as we did.

Peggysue

fred said...

Slightly off topic (and I hope you don't mind), but have you been following the Canadian thing?...

* Turkey has just captured a spy who has been helping get Westerners into Syria and ISIS. -- he helped the three UK girls we heard about recently. It seems that Mohammed Mehmet Rashid confessed (allegedly under torture) to working for the Canadian intelligence agency and had been based in Jordan. Canada has denied he worked for them.

* The Canadian ambassador to Jordan is Bruno Saccomani, a former RCMP officer who was in charge of PM Stephen Harper's security detail until Harper appointed him almost two years ago as the envoy to Amman, with dual responsibility for Iraq. The appointment raised significant diplomatic eyebrows at the time. It's not usual for a former mountie with few skills get to be an ambassador in a politically sensitive post such as Jordan. This was Harper's personal choice.

* What I missed at the time was a Wikileaks cable expose, revealed in Nov 2014, which claimed that the 2006 election of the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) was, essentially, a coup, a direct result of activities undertaken by the International Republican Institute (IRI) to install its preferred Canadian leadership.

If the dots are joined conspiratorially then the IRI helped install Stephen Harper who repaid the favor through Canada's Jordan embassy by assisting IRI activities in regard to ISIS.

Remember, the chairman of the International Republican Institute (IRI) since 1992 is John McCain, who, on his own admission, has maintained continuous contact with ISIS agents in Syria and elsewhere. And this is the IRI with a history of supporting popular revolutions since it (along with the NED) was first created as a cover for CIA activities.

Any thoughts?

b said...

No Zionist government has ever genuinely accepted or pursued a two-state solution. The line that 'terror' is their reason why not, which they have spouted since the Six Day War, is purest horse-shit.

Settlement has continued not for 50 years but for 120. The way the term 'settlement' is used exclusively for east of the 1967 green line is also horse-shit. Funny how nobody calls kibbutzniks settlers. And what's Tel Aviv if it's not a settlement?

A binational state would mean what - black and white polling cards?

There must be reparations.

Philo Vaihinger said...

Hard to believe you even read JG's article. Either that or your level of reading comprehension is shockingly low. JG does not endorse the idea that Israel is or ever was a safe refuge for Jews fleeing Europe.

But the people you and others refer to as "new fascists" in Europe are none of them actually fascists, so I suppose you are generally little interested in truth or reality.

Your evident ignorance of the historic origin and meaning of the term "fundamentalism" in connection with religion confirms this.

Does that mean you are the one who is mentally ill?

Joseph Cannon said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Joseph Cannon said...

Had Goldberg endorsed the idea explicitly, he would not have been printed in a mainstream journal. This is an old trick.

I am amused to learn that neither Brevik not his comrades are to be considered fascists. This is a novel proposition that flies in the face of everything I've read about Brevik and the faction he represents. Perhaps you should publish a book which explicates your novel conclusions...?

I think that I am not stretching the term "fundamentalist" beyond the bounds of its elasticity when I apply it to the (say) the nuke-happy editorialist quoted in my piece. Maybe you're one of those people who, when faced with the prospect of defending a weak argument, resorts to semantic gamesmanship. If that's your idea of fun, have a blast -- but don't expect to persuade anyone.

If you had actually seen Blumenthals' presentation -- which hit me every bit as hard as did my first viewing of "Night and Fog" -- then you would know that anyone who can defend the atrocities committed by Israel must have mental problems. If you tell me where you live, I can recommend a good therapist near you.